Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)

He sat on the bed, his leg stretched out in front of him. He looked as if he chose to sit there not because he was an invalid, but as a matter of prerogative. He might have been presiding over a meeting, the way he sat, ramrod straight. Even now, with nobody watching, he did not let a hint of weakness show. Kate felt suddenly weary on his behalf.

But instead of letting the emotion show, she simply tapped on the wall beside her. He looked up, and now that she was peering into his eyes, she could see the hints of emotion. There was that slight widening of his eyes when he saw her. His lips compressed, not in anger, but in pain, as he shifted his legs as if he were going to—

“Ned,” Kate said in as oppressive a tone of voice as she could manage, “you are not going to stand up to greet me. That would be extremely foolish.”

He paused, on the verge of swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. “Um,” he replied.

She sighed. “And let me guess. You refused all laudanum.”

As he was gritting his teeth in pain, instead of smiling in the dreamy wonder the drug would provide, she didn’t need him to answer.

“It’s cold in here,” she said. “Do you want me to—”

“No.”

Oh, yes. That. She always managed to forget it.

“On the physician’s orders, you’ll be confined to crutches for months. You might as well be comfortable. Can I bring you…some tea? A book?”

He glanced at her once more. “No.”

“Can I sit with you, then, and keep you company? Isn’t there something I can do for you?”

He smiled. “Nothing, Kate. No need to bother yourself.”

Kate stepped toward him. He was smiling, but his words were as much a betrayal as ever. When he’d been half dead on his feet, he’d insisted he didn’t need any help. Some of that, no doubt, had been a masculine, irrational response to overwhelming pain. But now that he was himself again, he was doing the same. He was just doing it more politely.

“Ned, you’re going to be limited for weeks. Months, perhaps. You might as well let me care for you, just a little.”

He didn’t say anything. His shoulders stiffened, though, and he leaned forward just an inch. “You were planning on staying in bed today, weren’t you?”

Still no response. No verbal response, that was, and the lack of meek assent on his part was as a denial. She waited until he finally looked up at her.

“But there’s Harcroft,” he said.

Just those words, and she understood what he meant. If she let herself think of what Harcroft could do, her own skin crawled.

“If I can stop him,” he said quietly, “I can do any thing.”

“But you can’t,” Kate said quietly. She sat in the chair by his bedside and reached for his hand. “You can’t do anything you wish. You certainly can’t do everything. There’s nothing wrong with that. I can respect you, even if your bones knit at a human pace. I can trust you even if you can’t get out of bed to catch me.”

He turned his palm down before she could take his hand. “That’s not it.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s not that I believe I must heal unnaturally quickly. It’s that… It’s that…”

“It’s that you don’t want me to help you.”

His head shot up at that, and a flare entered his eyes. “I don’t need help.” He spoke through gritted teeth. “I don’t ever intend to be a burden on you, Kate.”

“You’re not a burden, Ned.” She rested her hand lightly on his shoulder.

He looked away for a second. “Do you want to know why I don’t accept help? Why I can’t accept your charity, however kindly you mean it? It’s the same reason I sleep in the cold. Why I pitch hay, instead of having servants do it for me. It’s because I don’t dare allow myself common weaknesses.”

“I don’t want you to be weak. I just want—”

“You want to wrap me up in cotton batting, so I can’t get hurt. Do you want to know what happened in China, Kate?”

“I thought—”

“Do you want to know what really happened in China, after they pulled me out of the privy? I nearly killed myself.”

“An accident—”

“No. When I confronted Captain Adams in China, I wasn’t just desperate. I was fighting for every last scrap of determination that I could find, but weighted down by a black despair.”

She stared at him.

He spoke quietly. “You don’t know what I mean, when I speak of black despair. You think that is just hyperbole. After Captain Adams tossed me into the swamp, the feeling only intensified. I washed three times. It didn’t help. I couldn’t get the stink from my mind, no matter how raw I rubbed my skin.”

Ned was staring at a spot on the wall, his hands gripped on his knees. “He’d won. And there was no escaping the fact that he was right—that I was a useless excuse for a man, sent off because nobody at home needed me any longer.”

“You know that’s not true.”