Page 42 of The Companion’s Secret

Cami awoke with a start. The carriage had stopped; the sky beyond its windows was growing dark. Beneath her cheek, her pillow rose and fell with even, rumbling breaths. Confused, she pushed herself upright to find she had been curled against Gabriel’s side like a child. For what must have been hours, through even the changing of horses. She had probably snored. Or worse, drooled.

How could she have let herself sleep so soundly? How could she have let herself—? She clutched automatically for her writing desk and found it missing.

By the light of the inn yard’s lanterns, she fumbled searchingly, silently through the carriage’s dim interior. Vaguely, she remembered him trying to take the desk from her. Her fingers passed lightly over Gabriel’s hard thigh and knee—he wasn’t holding it either. With her toes, she felt about the floor—no, it hadn’t slid off her lap while she slept. Reaching out, more than half-blind, she slid her hands over the opposite seat until they struck the box’s wooden edges. When she grabbed it to her, she heard something else, something light—her bonnet, perhaps—fall to the floor. Where were her spectacles?

Heart racing, she opened the carriage door. She needed more light. She needed air. She needed to come to her senses, to throw off the disorientation of sleep. Without really meaning to, she stepped out into the night, discovering as she did so that the carriage steps had not yet been put down.

A simple misjudgment of distance. If she had realized the situation, she could have jumped down with ease. But now her foot, expecting to meet a level surface some inches above the ground, must stretch out farther. The awkward weight of her lap desk pitched her forward. And before she could reach to catch herself, she was falling. Her desk flew from her hands to land with a crash on the cobblestones some feet away. Twisting and flailing, trying to keep herself from meeting a similar fate, Cami threw up her arms and gave a cry as the ground rushed up to meet her.

“You, boy. Over here with some light.” Gabriel’s voice was husky with sleep. She could hear the carriage creak as he eased himself through the door, felt his boots strike the ground as he stepped down carefully to avoid her prone form. “Camellia.” He knelt beside her head and brushed her hair away from her face with fingers that did not seem to be quite steady. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” Cami managed to whisper. All the breath seemed to have abandoned her lungs. Oddly, her pain gave her some consolation. She knew she could not be badly injured if she could still feel everything. Scraped palms. Bruised knees. And—oh! “My ankle,” she gasped. “I think I must have twisted it.”

“Lie still,” he ordered. She felt his hands rearranging her skirts to cover her bare legs before he turned her and lifted her with surprising ease, cradling her against his chest as he nodded silent commands to the small crowd that surrounded them: the driver, grooms, servants of the inn, and even, to her deep mortification, some of the inn’s other patrons.

As they passed into the inn, she closed her eyes against the light and allowed them to stay closed. “I’m sure I could manage on my own,” she murmured, but he did not hear her, or pretended not to, at any rate. Without even an exchange of words, they were shown upstairs to a room, and in another moment, he was bending to seat her on the edge of a neatly made bed.

“I’ll just fetch some hot water for your missus, shall I?” An older woman’s voice, probably the innkeeper’s wife.

When Gabriel replied, she expected him to correct the woman’s error. But he merely thanked her. “And have someone bring up our things.”

“Very good, sir.”

Then they were alone. She peered up at him, a handsome blur. “Do you know what became of my spectacles?”

He lowered himself to her eye level; at this distance, she could make out every feature without squinting. “Tucked inside your bonnet. Which I very much hope I didn’t squash as I got out. Now, let’s see those hands.” Obediently, she held up her palms for his inspection. Some scrapes, but mostly dirt. Already the stinging had begun to abate. “And your ankle?”

Slowly, she rose and tested whether it would support her weight. It ached, to be sure, but she gritted her teeth against the pain. “Bearable.”

“Thankfully, there is no need at present for you to bear it.” He wrapped his fingers around her elbow to urge her back down to the bed.

A tap at the door gave way to a small parade of people: a maid with a ewer of steaming water in one arm and a stack of towels in the other, a boy with their bags, another carrying her writing desk, and finally the innkeeper’s wife to oversee the rest. When they had deposited their loads, the woman flapped them through the door with her hands. “Is there ought else?”

Surely Gabriel would request a second room, would put an end to this charade. Instead, he stepped closer to the door, clearly intending to shut it tight after her. “That will do. Thank you.”

Though as far as Cami could tell, Gabriel was making no particular effort to be charming—in fact, to her ear, he sounded rather terse—the innkeeper’s wife simpered nonetheless and curtsied on the threshold. “Well, ring if you need me.”

“But…but she thinks we’re married,” Cami whispered when the door closed.

Gabriel turned to face her, but at this distance, his expression was unreadable. “It’s for the best. This seems a respectable inn. We might have been turned away if she knew we weren’t.” She watched as he shrugged out of his greatcoat and slung it over a chair in the corner. “I’ll say you needed your rest after the fall and sit up tonight in the pub. It won’t be the first time,” he added with a self-deprecating laugh as he strode to the washstand and poured water from the ewer into the basin.

“Let’s see about getting you cleaned up first, though, shall we?” He approached with a damp cloth and she reached up for it automatically. A blurry smile spread across his face as he caught one wrist in a gentle hold and began carefully wiping the grime of the inn yard from her palms. It stung a bit, but less than submerging her hands in the basin would have. “There, see. Much better. Now…” He rinsed the cloth and wiped her face next. Was it streaked with dirt too? Either way, she could not deny how good the warm water felt against her skin.

“Thank you,” she murmured when he returned to the washbasin.

“Don’t thank me yet. There’s still that ankle to tend.”

“It’s fine.” She perched more upright on the edge of the bed, a position that required her to brace herself with her toes.

Gabriel must have seen the grimace that flickered across her face. “Fine, eh? Well, then, it won’t hurt to take a look.”

A look? It was not his eyes that worried her, but rather his long, clever fingers traveling over her foot, up her leg. But before she could wipe the image from her mind, or the flare of heat from her cheeks, he was kneeling on the floor before her. Without conscious thought, she drew her foot back under the protection of her skirts.

“Modesty, Camellia? I wouldn’t have thought a sensible woman like you would be susceptible to such nonsense.”

It wasn’t nonsense. Not really. More like self-preservation. With a deep breath, she stuck out her injured right foot. He slipped her shoe off and ran his fingers over her stocking-clad ankle. “A little swelling. Not as bad as I’d feared. Can you undo your stocking? I want to see if there’s any bruising.” To her relief, he rose and stepped back to the washstand while she hurriedly undid her garter, rolled down her stocking, and tugged it free of her toes with a little gasp of discomfort.

The sound did not escape his notice either. “Let me see,” he commanded in a brusque, businesslike voice she had never heard him use before. He dropped to one knee, lifted the hem of her skirt, and took her foot in his hands. “Can you bend it this way? Like that?” Slight pressure of his fingers directed which way she was to flex her ankle. She felt the heat of his palm against the sole of her foot as he asked to her press against him. “Good, good. Clearly not broken. Just strained a bit. It should be easy enough to rest it for a couple of days. By the time you reach Dublin, it should be back to normal. I’ll just—” He held up one of the linen towels, ripped it in two neat halves, and began to wind one strip around her foot and up her ankle to support the injured joint. She raised the hem of her dress a little higher to watch him work. How had he acquired this skill? Was it wrong to take pleasure in his touch?