“On, that must be the dog, sir.” George bent to pick up the puppy. “Clutchin‘ it like ’twas a lifeline, she was.”
Rufus, holding Portia against him as she swayed on her feet, surveyed the disreputable mutt in astonishment. Juno wagged a hopeful tail and panted breathily, tongue lolling.
“She saved my life,” Portia said, coherently although her voice was a thread and sounded strange to her ears. “She has to stay with me.”
Rufus couldn’t make sense of her words, but he was too relieved at hearing her speak to care. He hoisted her up and over his shoulder, holding her steady with an arm at her waist. Then he took the puppy from George, tucking it under his free arm, and set off back down the hill at a steady lope.
Portia was beyond noticing this undignified method of transport. She was aware only that she was safe… that sometime soon the deep cold shivers at her very center would cease and she would be able to rest. Beyond that, she couldn’t think.
Rufus flung open the cottage door and carried his two burdens inside. He dropped the puppy to the floor and eased Portia off his shoulder and onto a stool beside the fire. She still looked barely alive; even that flaring orange hair seemed to have dulled.
The incredulous thought occurred to him that she must have walked all the way from Castle Granville. And now he felt as he had once done when Toby, racing after a ball, had blithely leaped fully clothed into the river beneath the mill wheel just above the millrace. Rufus’s terror, once the child was safe, had yielded to an anger that neither he nor Toby had forgotten.
Portia’s body was convulsed with shivers, her teeth chattering unmercifully. “My ankle,” she said, reaching down to feel her wrenched ankle through her boot. “It hurts terribly.”
Rufus knelt to pull off her boot and then swore. The ankle had swollen and it was impossible to get the boot over it. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” He pulled his knife free of his belt and sliced gingerly through the side of the boot. “I cannot imagine what could have possessed you to attempt such a thing unless you’ve gone stark staring mad!”
“On, I’m mad all right,” Portia stated through waves of pain and misery as he eased the boot over her ankle. “Mad to think it mattered a damn to me whether you swung from Cato’s battlements or not.”
Rufus held her foot in his hand. He looked up into her white set face with an arrested expression. “Should I know what you’re talking about?”
But Portia’s horrified gaze was fixed on her ankle. Her foot looked as if it was attached to a pumpkin. A dead white pumpkin streaked with red. She stared dumbly at this repellent sight.
“Seemingly not.” Rufus murmured the answer to his own question. He had greater concerns at the moment, anyway. He returned his attention to her damaged foot, considering aloud, “Normally, the only way to bring down the swelling would be to pack your ankle in ice, but-”
“No!” Portia cried, tears welling at such a hideous prospect. “I couldn’t bear it.”
“If you’d let me finish, I was going to say that your flesh is already frozen, so I don’t suppose it would do any good at all.” He set her foot down gently and stood up. “I’ll bandage it tightly and then we’ll see. Right now you need to get out of those clothes.”
He strode upstairs, impatience reverberating in every step. Portia tried to staunch her tears. His anger seemed so unreasonable, after what she’d gone through to help him. And she was so desperately tired. Juno crept against her sodden skirts and whimpered in sympathy.
“These should provide some warmth.” Rufus reappeared with one of his own thick woolen shirts and a fur-lined robe. “You’ll have to try and stand on one leg… what is that unsavory mongrel doing?”
“She’s cold and tired and hungry,” Portia said.
“She’s also filthy.” Rufus supported Portia with one hand under her elbow while with the other he began to strip off her soaked garments. She swayed unsteadily, but with fatigue rather than lack of balance.
Rufus knew that the most pressing need was to warm her, to get the blood moving again beneath that delicate white skin. He was afraid of frostbite, particularly in her swollen ankle. Brusqueness hid his concern as he unbuttoned, unhooked, divesting her of every stitch of clothing.
As he peeled down her riding britches, he realized that the wet had seeped even through the leather. He ran his hands over her belly, down her thighs, across the flare of her backside. Her skin was deadly cold to the touch. He caught his breath.
“God’s bones, girl! You’re soaked to the skin! Of all the demented, infantile things to do! Have you completely taken leave of your wits? What did you think you were doing… taking a Sunday afternoon stroll in the hills?”
Portia stared down at her thin, shivering body. Her skin was a horrible dead white and she shuddered with distaste. Shuddered that he should be looking at her nakedness, should be handling her body as if it were a fish on a slab. She couldn’t bear to be standing naked before him. Her legs seemed like sticks, and her breasts were shriveled and covered in goose bumps, her nipples shrunken.
With an inarticulate imprecation, she shoved him aside and reached for the robe he’d hung to warm in front of the fire. She tore it down. “I can manage… leave me alone.” In her haste, she accidentally put her bad foot to the ground and reeled back with a cry of pain.
Rufus caught her against him. “Be still!” he thundered, and Juno yelped in fright, cowering against the table leg.
Portia gave up. She was at the very limit of her strength and her will to endure.
Rufus rubbed her body with a towel, roughly as he forced the blood back to the surface so that the dead white became tinged once more with a healthy pink. He turned her around, lifted her arms, parted her thighs, abrading the soft inner skin, leaving not an intimate cranny untouched. His jaw was set with grim determination, and if he was aware on any level that this was a body he had possessed, had played upon, had once brought to the peak of pleasure, he gave no sign. And through it all, Portia gritted her teeth and tried not to think of anything. Her skin began to feel as raw as a scraped potato, but she uttered not a sound.
“Now put these on.” He dropped his shirt over her head. It swamped her, reaching to below her knees. He pushed her arms into the wide sleeves of the fur-lined robe, much as he would have manipulated his sons’ arms into their jerkins. “Sit down.” He pushed her back onto the stool, and once more clothed, her vulnerability tucked away beneath wool and fur, Portia could allow herself to be aware of her surroundings.
“When did you last eat?” He began to bandage her ankle with wide strips of cloth.
“I had a mouthful of bread this morning. I had to give the meat and cheese to Juno; she was starving,” Portia replied, her voice dull. She was warm though. A wonderful marrow-deep warmth that went a long way to compensating for the throbbing ankle, now tightly bandaged.
Juno wagged her plumed tail and batted at Rufus’s leg with a small paw.
“She’s hungry too,” Portia explained unnecessarily. “Would you please feed her?”
Rufus looked at Portia on her stool, swathed in garments that completely drowned her. Her head was really all that was visible, an orange tangled halo sitting atop the dark fur collar of his robe. She was regarding him now with the rueful resigned bravado that had always inspired his respect and admiration, however reluctant.
Those slanted green eyes had haunted his dreams ever since she’d left him. That pointed nose. Those high cheekbones. The incredible softness of her skin was embedded in his hands’ memory. He had fought it, denied it. Told himself that if their encounter had come to a natural end, he would have felt none of these strange hankerings, no sense of unfinished business. But now, as he looked at her, he acknowledged that he had never felt for another woman what he felt for Portia Worth. Not that he knew exactly what it was that he was feeling. But it went way beyond the simple lust of a convenient, brief, sexual partnership.