Page 54 of A Dark and Stormy Knight
He put his hands on both her shoulders to keep her still as she tried again to sit up. His grip slid as her still-slippery limbs flailed in a wild attempt to fight him off.
After a few slick and ineffectual endeavors, he succeeded in pinning her arms at her sides, leaving her gleaming body completely bared to him.
He resolutely examinedonlyher eyes, as he leaned above her. They held no indication of the clouds one noted with a head wound. In fact, they sparked with dark azure tempests that would make Calypso proud.
“I didn’t slip, exactly,” she protested with a mulish expression.
“No? Then tell me how,exactly, you came to be on the floor.”
Long, dark lashes swept down over damp cheeks flushed with heat. “I… finished my bath, stood, and stepped out of the tub to reach for the towel. By the time I had one foot on the ground I was overwhelmed by extreme vertigo and thought to steady myself on the table.” A confused frown pinched between her brow as she looked over at the fallen furniture . “I must have fainted, because the next thing I knew I was on my back staring up at the ceiling.”
“I suspect you’re truly addled if you thinkanythingyou just imparted to me makes me feel a modicum of comfort,” he gritted through his teeth. “You and the childmustbe all right; do you understand me? You lie here. I will get a doctor. And he will examine you thoroughly. That is the end of this ridiculous discussion.”
He would have said more, but all the words had compressed the air out of his lungs, and he couldn’t seem to fill them. His hands trembled where they shackled her arms and the legs he knelt on felt too unsteady to hold their position for long.
It had beenyearssince his body showed such obvious signs of terror. Maybe since his very first battle when bullets missed him so narrowly, he couldhearthem sing by his ear.
Lord, but she was a weakness.
Instead of arguing, she lifted her palms to his chest, this time in careful conciliation. Her expression softened, warmed, and something pooled in her eyes that evoked inappropriate memories of the last time he’d held her beneath him.
“I’m not being reckless, you know. I often feel faint after a hot bath, and because our child is possessed of a finicky appetite, I haven’t been eating as I should. Certainly, that’s the cause of this spell.” Her lovely features gathered into a twist of self-effacing mortification. “I dare say I crumpled rather than fell, and landed on my back, not my stomach.”
His heart kicked beneath her hand, and he grappled with fierce and foreign emotion that stole his ability to speak.
“Is it your aim for the doctor to examine me in a shivering, naked puddle on the floor?” she asked with an arch of her brow.
Morley’s jaw slammed shut. Now wasnotthe time to notice her nudity. This was quite possibly a medical crisis.
He refused to glance down at her breasts.
He glanced.
He refused to look.
He looked.
Well he refused to appreciate.
Goddammit.
Lunging to his feet, he snatched the towel from the stand and returned to her, averting his eyes as he covered the more scandalous parts of her before crouching down again. “I’m going to carry you to the bed,” he warned.
“I’m quite capable of—ooph!”
He scooped her from the floor and hauled her against his chest as her bare legs dangled over his arm. The towel covered the front of her, but there was nothing between her skin and his hands as he hauled her to the bed and sat her down gingerly.
“Sir?” Bart called from the end of the hall. “What’s happened?”
Morley released her and strode to the door to keep the footman from venturing into the room and seeing anything he ought not to.
Likely saving the footman’s life.
“My wife has fainted and taken a fall; I need you to send for the doctor.”
Bart’s eyes went round with worry in his moonlike face. “Right away, sir.” He scurried back in the other direction.
Morley shut the door, and when he turned around, his knees nearly buckled from beneath him at the sight of his wife levered over her chest of drawers, her arm frantically fishing within.
