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normal slumber about dawn.
    Wearily Darth bathed Arabella one last time, and then he pulled the sheets and coverlet up to her chin. Afterward seeking the fire, which he stoked with more wood. There would be no sleep for him this morning, he considered tiredly as he sat on the Queen Anne settee facing the fireplace. He propped one of his long legs up on the opposite cushion from where he sat with his dark thoughts and even darker intentions. He was not entirely certain when it had happened. When he had stopped thinking of the idea of owning Arabella as an absurd notion and started entertaining it as his intentions.
     

Chapter Five
     
    Arabella came awake with a start. She was groggy and confused with a dull pain in her temple. Her first coherent thought was anguish over Nicholas, which drove her from the bed in disorientation. "Nicholas," she cried.
    "You are forbidden to speak another man's name!"
    Arabella nearly screamed at the sound of a man's voice so deep and filled with anger. She'd not seen him, she had not even seen where she might be. She nearly fell, but reached her hands outward instinctively and caught hold of the back of a settee in front of her. A settee that she had not known was there. It was then her muddled gaze focused on the large profile of a man sitting below her, on the same settee she held onto. For dear life.
    It was him , Arabella realized in shock as he turned his head to face her. It was the fearsome spellbinding Lord Peregrine, and then she remembered why it was she knew him at all. He owned her!
    "My name is Darth and that is the only man's name that will come from your lips. Tell me that you understand me properly." Lord Peregrine snarled these words with his marred face twisted into a frightening mask of anger, illuminating the predatory gleam in his gray eyes.
    Arabella gulped fearfully and began to turn. She would run from the mad man with his barbarous veneer and his wicked intentions. But suddenly Lord Peregrine groaned, with a harsh anguished sound, and Arabella saw from the corner of her gaze that it really was pain she could see on his scarred face, and perhaps not complete anger. He seized his face into his hands bending forward, and still she thought to run, especially while there was a chance to escape him.
    Pain, the word sliced through Arabella's mind, stopping her forward motion. She could not leave him in pain, she could never leave another human being in pain. She forced herself around the settee, realizing then that she was naked. Only at that same moment Lord Peregrine moaned again, a horrible sound, and she forgot her unclothed state as soon as she had thought of it. Moving swiftly to his side Arabella placed her hands to Lord Peregrine's hands and she pried them away from his face.
    "Lay back, my Lord, I am a healer and I would help you."
    "There is no help when it comes on me." Darth hissed through gritted teeth.
    "Then it cannot hurt for me to try," Arabella insisted, pushing him backward, until his head lay on the arm of the settee. It was an easy accomplishment in his suffering. His eyes were clenched against obvious agony as she began to massage his temples with some firm circular motions. She massaged along his scar, up into his scalp, and then down his cheek, especially around his eye. It looked as if he had been sliced with a sword. However, by the look of the scarring, she could tell it had been years ago.
    "It grips you most when you are tired," Arabella stated firmly, knowing that tension would serve to draw up the scarred flesh tightly, inflaming it. She had seen injuries of its measure before, although not in the face, when working with her mentor Lady Serena on the island of Jamaica. Lady Serena was an elderly black woman, a native of the island, and considered a black magic shaman. What she really was, was a native doctor of herbs, but she said that she never minded the superstitions surrounding her, if it let her help more people.
    "Have you tried heat?"