To Have and to Hold by Diana Palmer Read Free Book Online Page B

in the hedge if I'm occupied. Fair enough?"
    "It isn't necessary," she replied proudly. "I won't come again unless I'm invited. I don't like imposing...."
    "Oh, God, you're asking for it," he said in a voice unlike anything she'd ever heard. "Go inside. Quick, damn it!"
    She took one look at his face and went in the door without another word.
    ❧
    Her throat felt worse than ever as she crawled into bed and turned out the light. The room, in the darkness, seemed to spin around and around. If only it weren't so hot....
    When she woke up the next morning, she couldn't even raise her head, and her throat felt like an oven. She tried to speak and found that she couldn't. There were aspirins on the bedside table and half a glass of water. She took the tablets and swallowed them down, leaning back exhausted against the pillows. It would have been funny if it weren't so frightening. She couldn't get to a phone to call for help, and it looked like her rations for the rest of the weekend were going to be aspirins and less than a half a glass of water. Tears of sick frustration ran down her cheeks. Even Cal wouldn't come looking for her now, not after last night.
    She buried her face in the cool pillow and cried like a baby. She was alone in the world, and everybody who could have cared about her wouldn't, and she hoped they'd all come to her funeral and hate themselves—they being Cal. She hoped he wouldn't bring the brunette. That would ruin it all.
    By the end of the day, she could feel the fever beginning to climb dangerously, but there was nothing she could do to get it down. The aspirin bottle was empty, and there were only a couple of teaspoons full of water left in the glass. With a muffled groan, she closed her eyes and drifted away....
    She was floating, and it was hot, so very hot. She kept asking why it was so hot, but no one would answer her. Then she was in a cool mountain stream, feeling the water wash over her body like wet silk, cooling, cooling, washing her parched lips, her dry face and hands. It was the most beautiful feeling, like a caress, like a tender caress as it bathed her all over in its coolness.
    A sound, something, woke her. Her eyes opened drowsily, and she saw Cal sitting in a chair by her bed. His face was shadowed with a faint growth of beard, his hair rumpled as if by restless fingers. His clothes were rumpled, too, as if he'd slept in them.
    "What are you...doing here?" she croaked.
    He raised an eyebrow and lifted a glass of water from the bedside table. Moving to sit beside her on the bed, he lifted her head in one big hand and gave her a sip of the cool, clear liquid. It tasted like heaven to her parched mouth.
    "How delicious," she whispered with a wan smile.
    "I thought it would be." He put the glass down and studied her through bloodshot eyes. "Feel any better?"
    She moved under the covers and suddenly discovered something. She wasn't wearing a nightgown—or anything else. Defensively, her fingers clutched the sheet and she looked at him with the question in her wide eyes, her flushed face.
    "You were running a temperature of 104," he said quietly. "I couldn't get in touch with the doctor, and I had to get it down quick. It was the only way."
    "I see," she whispered.
    "God, you're lovely, woman," he said with something like reverence in his tone. He stood up, ignoring her blazing embarrassment, and went to the window. "I finally got in touch with my doctor and described your symptoms. He said it's probably flu and called in a prescription to the drugstore for some antibiotics. I'm going to pump you full of them for the next three days, and if you're not better by then, you're going to his office."
    "Three days?" she gasped. "But, I can't, I've got to go to work, I'm...!"
    He came back to the bedside and leaned down, his big hands making deep impressions in the pillow on either side of her head as he looked straight into her eyes. "Three days, madam. Precisely three days, if I have to climb