Page 74 of The Earl She Once Saved

“That is not the same as having none.”

Her expression closed slightly. Even feverish, he recognized the wall, because he touched the place behind it.

Rafe lifted her hand without meaning to. “I never forgot you.”

Verity went utterly still. He felt her pulse beneath his fingers.

“After the war,” he whispered, “I thought it would stop.”

“What?”

“Seeing you.”

Her breath changed. Rafe stared at their joined hands. He had no sense left with which to stop himself.

“When I closed my eyes, when I drew. Sometimes in a crowd, I would see dark hair and think—”

His voice failed. Verity said nothing.

“I thought of you for years.”

The truth lay between them. He had imagined speaking it differently, if he ever spoke it at all. Not sick in bed, his voice broken and his body shaking beneath the weight of a fever. He would have liked some dignity. Instead, there was only honesty.

Verity’s face seemed to lose its certainty. He watched the change move through her. It was not softness. It was something more profound and unwilling, as if a belief driven deep into the earth had shifted beneath her feet.

She believed herself forgotten. He understood that suddenly. Not merely by him, by everyone who had left.

Verity looked away. She reached for the basin and wrung out the cloth with one hand.

“You must rest.”

“I rested for years.”

“You were fighting a war … that was not rest.”

“No,” he said quietly. “I suppose it was not.”

She laid the cloth across his brow. The coolness brought a breath of relief. Rafe closed his eyes. Her hand remained against him, holding the cloth in place. He turned his face toward it. His cheek rested against the back of her fingers.

Verity inhaled sharply. He should have released her. Even through the fever, he knew that. She was his brother’s wife. She had spent every waking moment since he returned making it plain that she trusted neither his name nor his intentions.

But his guard was gone. His hand closed around her wrist, not tightly, only enough to keep her there.

“Rafe.”

“Stay.”

The word escaped like a plea. For one suspended moment, she did not move. Then the back of her hand brushed his cheek, a touch she would never have given him in daylight.

Rafe opened his eyes. Verity was looking at him with a tenderness so carefully hidden that he might have doubted it if her fingers had not moved once more against his skin.

Her breath caught. Rafe thought, with the last clear fragment of his mind, that she was not as unmoved as she had spent the past fortnight pretending.

But then, a floorboard sounded near the door and Verity pulled her hand away. Cold rushed into its place.

Rafe looked up to find Ezra standing upon the threshold. His gaze moved from Verity to Rafe, then to the cloth fallen across the pillow.

“The physician is coming up,” he told them.