Cates, Kimberly Read Online Free PDF

her hand inside it, laying the outer edge of the scissor blade against her own palm as she snipped the exquisite linen away. A broad landscape of muscles rippled against the back of her hand. Ridges, hard and powerful, beneath skin like rough satin. Warmth seeped through her, fiendishly intimate, the soft prickle of a silken web of hair roughening the hard plane ever so slightly.
    She glanced back up at his face, the aristocratic line of his jaw, the arrogant slash of nose, the chiseled perfection of his parted lips, exquisite despite their pallor, enthralling despite his unconsciousness. What would he think if he awakened to find her handling him thus? The coolness of his eyes, like ice in a mountain stream, flickered into her memory.
    The scissors slipped, sharp pain slicing into her thumb. Rhiannon yelped, yanking her hand out from beneath the shirt, thrusting the wounded digit into her mouth, a hot flush of embarrassment flooding her whole body. She was appalling, thinking such things about the poor man while he lay there, helpless!
    But she had to admit that it had felt so good to touch someone, to feel human warmth, a need even her precious woodland creatures couldn't fully satisfy. Before Papa died, there had been hugs aplenty— she'd never passed him without his reaching out to tug her curls or pat her cheek or scoop her up in a loving embrace. She'd never realized how much she missed that contact until now.
    But this was hardly the same. This man was helpless, in her care. And yet perhaps, hurt as he was, he needed the comfort as much as she did. Maybe there was a loved one he was worrying about, missing, someone wondering why he hadn't returned to his post. A sweetheart or a wife, a passel of golden-haired children. Why was it that the possibility stung her so badly? Because once she had dreamed of having her own rollicking brood, one more hope that had faded.
    Taking fierce hold of her ridiculous emotions, Rhiannon returned to her task, ridding the captain of his shirt. But as she stripped it away, she discovered something far more unnerving: raised slashes where sabers must have bitten, scars from battles he'd fought, deaths he'd barely escaped. He was a soldier. It shouldn't have surprised her that he carried such marks of his trade.
    But no creature so beautiful should have been savaged this way. What had these wounds and the violence they represented cost him? Not only his body but his soul?
    Somber, she worked to remove the breeches that clung to the officer's lean hips and steely-thewed thighs like a second skin. Rhiannon eased off his breeches, then took a clean rag, a bucket of water, and began gently scrubbing away the smears of dirt, the dark stains of blood. First, his face—haughty angles, broad brow, stubborn jaw—then down the cords of his throat.
    If he'd been Irish, she might have thought him king of the otherworld come out to wander—all powerful, ruthless, perhaps a trifle cruel—come to take a mortal he desired. But he wasn't a man born to standing stones and tales of fairy magic, myths of Cuchulain or Manannán mac Lir, Celtic god of the sea. He was polished to a far different sheen, this man.
    Glistening with dampness, scrubbed clean, he seemed like some warrior Caesar, vast empires crushed beneath his heel. A man completely out of place in this humble gypsy caravan, with its bright paint and cramped quarters, sheets so often washed they were worn soft as a baby's cheek.
    She drew the sheet up over his body.
    "Sleep now. Rest," she whispered to him. "I've got you safe." His eyes fluttered open for a moment, heart-piercingly blue.
    "Safe?" He laughed, an ugly sound.
    She reached out to touch him.
    He stiffened. "No... don't..." A groan tore from his lips. Then he sagged back, unconscious. Had she hurt him somehow? Jarred his wound? Rhiannon wondered in dismay.
    "I'm sorry," she murmured, stunned to find that even though he was still again, his image was branded into her mind. That face, so