Lost in Your Arms by Christina Dodd Read Free Book Online

it smell like summer mornings in the orchard? Don’t you remember what it’s like to pick a bushel of peaches, and feel the fuzz float down your back and collect in the creases of your neck and itch? Don’t you wish you were out there, stretched in the grass, eating a peach fresh from the tree and watching the sun filter through the leaves while a faint breeze dusts your cheeks?”
    Mrs. Brown’s hands moved slowly along his back as Enid talked.
    Caught up in the picture she had created, Enid knelt beside the bed and spoke softly, insistently, into his ear. “It’s so beautiful outside. A summer like no other has been before, or will be again, and you’re wasting it in the sickroom.” She brushed his hair back from his face, wanting nothing so much as to see him open his eyes and hear him speak. She had worked too hard to return him to health to let him languish in this unconscious state. Beneath the surface his mind was stirring, and she longed to communicate with him, to discover if his aura of power and honor was a true representation of his being . . . or whether she had stitched it up from fragments of longing and threads of loneliness. She tried to lure him with voice and words and touch. “We could laugh together—lazy fools that we are—and tellstories about other summers more grand than this, but we would know we were lying, because this is the best time in the world. The sun is ours, the sky is blue,
the scents are lush and full of fruit so ripe it hangs from the trees and flowers wild with bloom. Come back to me, MacLean, and I’ll take you there.”
    Then he opened his eyes and said, “All right, you can take me there. But first, tell me—who are you?”

Chapter 5
    The female stared at him, her startling blue eyes unblinking, her rosy lips slightly open as if she were surprised. She inhaled, long and slow, and in a measured tone repeated, “Who . . . am . . . I?”
    If she were a man, he would have snapped her head off for such inanity, but he had a softness for women, all women, and this lass was a fetching piece. So fetching, in fact, he was surprised he didn’t remember her name. He’d seen her before, and he’d wanted nothing more than to touch her, but he’d contented himself with just looking because . . . because . . . why didn’t he remember her? He searched his memory. His excellent memory that had never failed him before. Why didn’t he remember her?
    What had she done to him?
    In a voice harsh with suspicion, he demanded, “Who are you? I remember you, glowing, your hair tumbling about your shoulders, but . . . I can’t recall . . . your name.”
    “Praise be, he’s awake!” Another woman spoke from behind him.
    He tried to fling himself around, to see who stood behind him at his unprotected back.
    Pain struck at his joints, at his muscles, at his leg. With a vicious curse, he fell back on the bed.
    The female kneeling beside the bed leaped to her feet and clutched his shoulders.
    The other female grabbed at him. “Muscle cramps, sir, not surprising in yer condition,” she said.
    The women, whoever they were, were all over him now, chirping, holding, easing him onto his back. His leg, the center of that lancinating pain, dragged until the second wench lifted it and placed it on a pillow. Then he fell backward, panting.
    The other female was older, plump and sharp-eyed, to all appearances a proper English villager. No threat. Not now. He glanced about the room. Treetops waved outside the open windows, the ceiling had open rafters and sloped down . . . so they kept him in an attic room. For what purpose?
    What was wrong with him? Where was he?
    Who was he?
    Panic rose in him. Panic, which he subdued at once, and fury, which he allowed to grow. For he didn’t know the answer to the most basic question of all. But he would get that answer, and now.
    He looked again at the young woman. She watched him, eyes wide and shining. He knew her, damn it, but he couldn’t