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‘Poorly, Major. She’s exhausted. I’ve never seen anyone so seasick. Twenty-six hours at sea and she couldn’t keep anything down, not even water. And she wasn’t feeling too strong beforehand.’ The look she sent him was cool. It seemed she knew who to blame for Rose’s lowered spirits. ‘I couldn’t get her to rest at an inn in Margate, she said she wanted to come to her own place. She’s worse today, so I sent for the doctor.’
‘Where is she?’ Flint went past her to the door she had emerged from.
‘You can’t go in there, Major, it isn’t seemly.’ Jane tried to push in front of him.
‘Seemly be damned.’ He shook off her hand. ‘That’s my betrothed in there. Go and get the cook to make chicken soup and soft white bread and bring up weak sweet tea at once.’
*
‘Rose!’
She dragged open heavy lids. It was too much, she felt like death and now she was having hallucinations. ‘Go ’way,’ she managed to croak through lips that felt as though they were covered in rice paper.
The apparition of Adam neither vanished nor wavered. ‘I’m not going anywhere and you are not going to die on me. You were too much trouble last time.’
‘Adam?’
‘Who else?’ He raked one hand through already dishevelled hair and began to unbuckle his sword belt. ‘Where’s that girl with the tea?’
‘Tea?’ Vague thoughts of tea parties and dainty cakes swam through Rose’s mind. ‘You’re really here?’
‘Give me that.’ There was a clatter of china, then she was being hauled up into a sitting position and pillows stuffed down behind her back. ‘Drink this.’ A cup was pressed to her lips.
‘Can’t. It just comes back up.’ She pushed the cup away with a hand that seemed as heavy as stone.
‘This won’t. Try for me.’ The cup pressed against her lips again. ‘Just sip.’
It was too much effort to fight. She sipped and swallowed and her stomach heaved.
‘Don’t you dare,’ Adam said in the tone she’d last heard him use to Private Williams when he caught him trying to hobble out to find a gin shop.
Rose opened her mouth to protest and tea was poured in. This time her stomach accepted it. ‘More,’ she managed.
Adam tilted the cup again, then set it aside. ‘That’s enough for a minute.’ He got to his feet, still snapping at her. ‘Look at you, what the devil do you think you were doing? They must have told you it was going to be rough and you weren’t feeling well to begin with. And then not to rest when you got to Margate is ridiculous.’ He came back to the bed with a towel and a damp cloth in his hands and began to wash her face with a gentleness that was the opposite to his voice.
‘I can be ridiculous if I want to,’ Rose muttered. The cool cloth was bliss as he smoothed it over her crusted lips and sore eyes.
‘Not under my command you don’t. Have some more tea.’
She drank and the room stopped moving up and down and the pounding headache eased a fraction. ‘I’m not under your command.’ Oh, but it was so good to see him. So impossible. So wrong.
‘All right. But I am responsible for you. We are betrothed,’ Adam said.
Perhaps it was not so good, after all, if he was going to be dictatorial. ‘I am responsible for myself.’ Adam raised one eyebrow. He did not have to say it: she was not taking very good care of herself. ‘Besides, I broke it off.’
‘Your intelligence was faulty,’ he said, his voice dry. ‘You were taken in by enemy spies and you misunderstood what you heard with your own ears.’
None of that made any sense. Rose reached for the teacup and he filled it and put it in her hand. She drank it down slowly, thinking. ‘How did you get here?’
‘Your father sent for me the moment he found your note. I left at once and I was kicking my heels in Ostend for days, imagining you shipwrecked.’
The remembered anxiety in his voice caught at her heart and her eyes filled with tears before she registered what that headlong journey implied. ‘You can’t have just left like that!’ She might not know much about military life, but she knew an officer did not simply leave on personal business. ‘You deserted your post—they’ll court-martial you and you’ll never get command of the Rogues.’
‘I resigned. Tom Bartlett has taken over my duties.’
‘No. Oh, Adam, no!’ He couldn’t throw it away, couldn’t be so impossibly honourable and gallant all because she had made one monumental mistake. ‘Go back, tell them you have changed your mind. I don’t want you, I have come to my senses.’
‘You have?’ He said it without a smile. ‘So you did not mean what you wrote in that note?’
