One With the Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

strip this man naked. The very thought excited her body. Stop it! She started with his neckcloth. It was tied simply but it was clean; at least it had been clean before the blood. He was deathly pale. As she worked, a cut on his forehead slowly closed. Papa would be sorry to have missed it.
    She should take a tip from her father’s attitude. This was science. They were impartial observers. She ought to be able to observe a naked man calmly. She had done so many times, as her father dissected cadavers and she had handed him instruments while she absorbed as much anatomy as she could. She tossed the cravat to the floor and grabbed the neck of his shirt. It ripped easily with her strength. She tore the sleeves then pulled the whole thing out from under him. Nasty sword wounds. Shoulders, sides, chest, arms, belly. Several were deep enough to show bone or intestine. Sweet Lord, but she had never seen a man cut up so! Under the gore he was certainly well made. His shoulders were broad, his chest well defined with muscle. Dark hair curled over his breastbone and then cradled his pectoral muscles in twin crescents. His nipples, pink and soft just now, made him look more vulnerable than did the wounds …
    Never mind that! Boots. She couldn’t get his breeches off unless she removed his boots. She grasped first one and then the other. They were finely made but worn, not dandyish with white tops but serviceable, though they were soaked with blood. She tossed them aside and pulled off his stockings. His head rolled to one side. His neck was strong. His throat still beat with a pulse, though where it got the blood for that she wasn’t sure. There were small white, round scars just under his jaw. But this was no time to examine them. A vee of dark hair on his belly seemed to point downward, across the gaping wound there. The throbbing in her loins was becoming ridiculously insistent. Where had he come from? They might never know, if he were to die. Could he die? The vampire in the laboratory had died. And his passing had caused her a tremor of revulsion that seemed to come from the parasite in her veins. She worked the buttons on the stranger’s breeches, just below the gaping wound in his belly. Her fingers touched the flesh below his navel and that light dusting of hair. The jolt she felt—could that be actual passing of energy between them? Never mind! She ripped the fabric, sending buttons flying. Breeches were pulled out from under him, tossed aside. His smalls were the work of a moment.
    She sucked in a breath and stepped back. Oh, my.
    Her father scurried in, his bag in one hand and the writing box in the other. “It was in my room of all places.” He stopped. “Interesting. I shouldn’t think he’d have enough blood for that.”
    Her father was reacting to the impressive erection the stranger was exhibiting. Heat spread to Jane’s face from somewhere at her core. Luckily, her father was too preoccupied to notice. He lit another lamp as she went to get some hot water from the caldron sitting in the coals of the peat fire. The room brightened from a romantic glow to stark surgical light. Jane shook her head to clear it. Her only experience with a man had not prepared her for this stranger.
    Her father peered closely at the stranger’s body. “The wounds have stopped bleeding already,” he muttered. “I’ll wash him, Jane, as I examine him. Can you just take a note or two? I mustn’t be distracted from my observations.”
    Thank the Lord God he hadn’t asked her to wash the man. She didn’t think she’d survive it. Somehow, Jane moved to the little box in which her father kept his writing equipment and took out his notebook, the stoppered inkstand, and a quill. She glanced at the watch she wore round her neck and noted the time. It was nearly ten.
    “Just put down ‘firm erection.’ We’ll see how long it lasts,” her father murmured, adjusting his spectacles. He scrutinized the stranger’s body.