Page 32 of The Hundred Loves of Juliet
She sits up and winces.
“Ankle?” I ask.
“I think so.”
Against my better judgment, I sit down on the coffee table across from her. “Put your foot up here. Let me take a look at it.”
Helene doesn’t move right away. I’ve definitely flummoxed her by being hot one minute and cold the next. Mostly cold.
But she needs help, and no matter how much I want to push her away, I’m not going to deny her medical attention.
Instead of putting her foot on the coffee table, though, she sets it on my knee.
I recoil involuntarily. Not because I don’t want to touch her, but because Ishouldn’t.
Helene misinterprets my reaction. “Oh god, does it stink?” She immediately retracts her leg. “My foot stinks, doesn’t it? Argghhh, this is not going well at all.”
“You smell fine,” I say gruffly. I pick up her leg and set her foot on my knee again; however, I make sure I only touch her jeans, not her skin. It’s a compromise, a half touch. “Can you move your ankle around?”
Helene tries to rotate it, but she flinches. “Ooh, not good.”
“Is the pain over the ankle bone, or the soft part?”
“The soft part, I guess? Hard to tell.”
I squeeze her ankle cautiously.
As soon as my fingertips meet her skin, a surge of heat washes over me. It’s what I’d wanted to avoid, but now, touching her, I’m suddenly drunk on the feeling of sunshine, even though it’s the middle of the night.
I draw in a sharp breath. But I can’t let go of Helene. I don’t want to.
I tell myself I’m holding on because someone has to wrap her ankle to give it stability. She won’t be able to see a doctor for days, until the roads clear.
My fingers are clumsy, overwhelmed by being so close to her. And when I finally finish with the wrap, I hold on to her for a few seconds longer than necessary. My pulse trips over itself.
I have to put distance between us again. Not only physical, but emotional, too. I set her foot on the coffee table and all but sprint to one of the leather armchairs on the other side of the living room.
“Thank you for wrapping my ankle,” she says.
“I only did it because I need you mobile,” I say, letting the former iciness settle into my tone again. “I don’t want to be your servant while you’re stuck here.”
Helene cringes at the return of brusqueness. But she recovers quickly and asks, “What do you mean, ‘while you’re stuck here’?”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” I say, as if I couldn’t care less what she does and doesn’t know. “The tow truck isn’t running becausethe roads are closed, due to an incoming blizzard. It might be a few days.”
I think she might scowl at me now, or tell me off. She’d be justified.
But instead, Helene pours a hefty slug of Bailey’s into her coffee and says, “Perfect. Then you have plenty of time to explain why you’re such an asshole to me, when apparently you’re a saint to everybody else.”
OXFORD, ENGLAND—1839
For twenty-five years, I work as a naturalist under the name of Charles Montague, traveling the world collecting plant specimens and studying animals. There are people in these far-flung places, of course, but none interest me as much as the flora and fauna. And because of this, I accumulate a bit of a reputation for being an eccentric—as the Royal Society puts it, I am “the only man in known history to prefer the company of flower pistils to human females.”
I have a jolly good laugh at that.
My single-minded dedication is noticed not only by my colleagues at the Royal Society, however, but also by Queen Victoria. Her Majesty bestows upon me the order of Knight Commander of the Bath for “great British contributions in the realm of botany,” and I gain the title “Sir” in front of my name. It is a singular accomplishment of which I am proud, even for a man such as myself who has tried so many different things in my lifetime.
As the years pass, however, I consider the possibility it’s time to hang up my explorer hat. My friend and fellow scientist Richard Banks sits slowly in a leather armchair in front of the fire.Richard’s sixty-eight-year-old joints creak—they are the legacy of many decades crouching down into bushes and grass to examine root systems—and the damp in my home in Oxford doesn’t help his old bones. He drapes a blanket over his legs.
