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“It’s quite sad.” The cloth moved from her forehead to the side of her face. Belle refused to look at him and instead stared up at the dark roof overhead.
“I’m just now noticing that myself. As a child, I…only cared about how soothing it was to me.”
The cloth moved over her nose, patting away the sweat that had formed. She finally gave into the urge to look at him and, once again, found him much closer to her that she expected. She held her breath, staring into his green eyes as they roved over her face and concentrated on his task.
He is a commoner and yet he seems to have such a dignified air about him.
Belle wondered if that was why she was so comfortable in his presence. All her life, she’d learned to never be left alone with a gentleman, to always have a chaperone with her. Even though she claimed to be Hannah, she was shocked at how easy it was to forget the things ingrained in her since she was but a child.
“Something seems to be on your mind,” Stephen said softly, his breath tickling her cheek. His eyes darted down to meet hers as he pressed the cloth to the other side of her face, his movements slow and deliberate.
“I’m thinking about my horse,” Belle lied, looking away from him. As her fever raged, it was growing harder and harder keeping a proper train of thought. “Where is she? She dislikes thunder very much. It’s why she threw me off her back in the first place.”
“She is with my horse in the barn nearby. Perhaps my horse will be able to calm her.”
“Do you think so?” Belle thought of the two horses consoling each other in the barn and the image made her giggle. “Shadow has never been very sociable, you know. She only likes me and Tom.”
“Is Tom another horse?”
“Yes,” she breathed, and when she thought of Tom as a horse, she giggled again. “He’s another horse. He’s very sociable and gets along with the others.”
“The others?” Stephen questioned. As Belle stared into the ceiling, she heard the ripple of water as he dipped the cloth back in. Soon, she felt the cool sensation back on her forehead, wiping away the sweat that had already formed in its absence. “You have other horses?”
“Well, they aren’t mine, per se. Aren’t they all our horses, Stephen? The horses of life?”
Stephen chuckled. “You sound quite mad.”
“Perhaps,” she said, giggling along with him. “But Shadow has been mine since she was born. I was young myself when I began to ride her, but I’ve been riding from an even younger age.”
Belle looked at him in time to see the spark of surprise in his eyes. “Have you?”
“Of course, haven’t you? I’ve always loved riding. The moment my Father first had me introduced to the practice, I couldn’t get enough of it. Of course, he had his more cunning reasons for doing so but I couldn’t care less about them. I’d found my passion.”
“What an odd thing for a father to do,” Stephen murmured thoughtfully.
Belle couldn’t find the mental strength to decipher what the tone of his voice meant. Perhaps she should remain silent, lest she revealed more of herself than she intended, but she couldn’t find the strength to do that either.
“I’ve never been in pain like this before, Stephen,” she admitted to him, her voice low. At the mention of the pain, as if it was pleased by her confession, her ankle throbbed in even harder and she winced.
Stephen’s dabbing cloth ventured down to her neck then back up. “I’ll get you help soon, Hannah. Don’t worry. You only need to survive the night.”
But with the raging storm outside, it feels as if it will last forever.
“Will you stay by my side?” she asked him. She looked into his eyes, let herself drown in the kind pool of brown. Somewhere in the distant back of her mind, a voice told her that such a thing was unladylike.
And, as mad as it sounded, it seemed like another voice reminded her that she was no longer a lady.
“If that is what you want,” Stephen said. He stopped wiping at her face, staring back into her eyes as if he wanted to read every emotion, every secret that were hidden behind it. Belle knew how to hide her emotions well. But in this state, she wasn’t sure how best she’d be able to do so.
So, she closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. “Thank you. For this. And for helping me.”
“You’re welcome, Hannah. It would be unbecoming of me to leave you all alone while you suffer.”
“Then let me be grateful that you are no terrible brute,” she tried to joke, her laughter turning into a grimace.
“Keep talking, Hannah,” he said as he resumed what he was doing. “If you go to sleep now then I don’t know if you’ll wake up again.”
Keep talking. Keep talking.
