The Truest Heart Read Online Free PDF

these were but the outward wounds.
    Was she a fool to think she could save him? Perhaps. Yet even as the realization tolled through her, something crystallized inside her. She could not give in. He could not give in.
    In a heartbeat she’d bounded to her feet. She raced to the well atop the hill for water. In her haste, she nearly tripped and barely caught herself from flying headlong onto the mossy path. Her movements jerky, she lowered the leather bucket into the well. When she raised it and grabbed the leather handle, water sloshed over the edge—her hands were shaking.
    “Calm yourself, Gillian.” She scolded herself firmly. “Stay calm, else you cannot help him.” The words screamed through her again and again as she returned to the cottage, then warmed the water and searched for a cloth.
    Indeed, she told herself as she stationed herself beside him, she could do no more. She could do no less. Though he might well be beyond her power, it was just as she’d told Brother Baldric. If she did not help—did not try—he would surely die.
    Lightly, her fingers skimmed his body, her eyes fixed on his face for any sign of reaction. In truth, she would have welcomed it. Alas, there was none. If she caused him pain, he gave no sign of it. Even when she scrubbed the gritty sand and dirt from the open wound on his side and his knee—ah, but it was stubborn!—he neither flinched nor winced. Nor did he move when she fetched a healing salve Brother Baldric had obtained for a cut she’d received on her leg during the journey, and rubbed it into his wounds.
    Something twisted inside her as she finished bathing him, then wound a strip of cloth around his mangled knee. Dear God, how could Baldric believe this man might harm her? He posed no threat to her, nor to anyone!
    Laying the strips aside, she turned back to him. An odd feeling tightened her throat. Only then did she realize what she had just done…. To think that she had been so bold as to strip the clothes from his body! A part of her was appalled. She had touched him…
    He was starkly… unabashedly … naked. Though Gillian was a woman untutored in the ways of love and men, ‘twas not a sight she found displeasing. Indeed, quite the contrary, for there was no denying he was a powerful man. Belatedly she acknowledged what she had not taken the time to note before. Pale though he was, his frame looked impossibly large; he filled the entirety of her narrow bed. His shoulders nearly eclipsed the width of the mattress, lean but padded with muscle—she’d felt the resilient tautness of that muscle beneath her very fingertips! Aye, she thought dimly. Under other circumstances, he was surely a man of considerable might.
    Hastily she fumbled with the rough linen sheet at his ankles, pulling it up and following it with a blanket. His hair had begun to dry. The strands were thick and dark, the color of midnight. Biting her lip, she laid the back of her knuckles against the stranger’s cheek before she knew what she was even about, the gesture one of comfort and compassion. A hundred questions tumbled through her.
    “What brought you to this lonely stretch of England?” she voiced her thoughts aloud. “Do you come from some foreign shore? What is your trade? Are you a fisherman? Nay, perhaps not. You’ve not the tough, leathered skin of a man who weathers long hours of sea and sky. A tiller of fields then? Nay,” she decided, tilting her head to the side and regarding him through narrowed eyes. “Mayhap you work long and hard at the forge.” Indeed, he possessed the brawny arms of a man who could carry great weight with just as much ease.
    That, too, she discarded, for there was a hint of arrogance in the aquiline flare of his nose, the set of his mouth. Nay, he was not a poor man, though he’d worn no jewels. She glanced at his boots; although slogged with water, they were finely made.
    Her mind twisted and turned. Could it be that he was one of John’s barons? God