‘Oh, for goodness sake, all you have to do is keep still, Max. Anyone would think I was getting ready to torture you.’
Georgia tightened her grip on the bottle of whatever it was the doctor said she needed to rub into his back and refused to go away again as he wanted her to.
‘I will get Sam and the stable boys to come and hold you down while I rub this stuff in if you refuse to let me do it, so why don’t you allow me to get on with it without all this fuss? You just need to take off your nightshirt and lie on your belly while I massage this stuff in because the doctor says it will bring your bruises out faster so your body can heal itself. The sooner we get this done, the sooner you can go back to sleep.’
‘We men do have our own sort of modesty, you know?’ he said grumpily and glared at her as if she was being perverse when she only wanted to help him get better.
She hated him having to lie up here hurting when there was something she could do to help him heal. She winced at the thought of rubbing the doctor’s potion into his sore back and making it ache even more, but it would be cowardly of her to meekly go away without doing so.
She was his wife, for goodness sake—nobody should be better suited to do this than she was. If she must fight her inner coward to become a better wife to him, she was going to do so and she might as well start now.
‘You should not have climbed a broken ladder to rescue a contrary old cat if you care so much about your privacy,’ she told him unsympathetically.
She wanted to laugh at his grimace of offended manly pride, but bit her lip. He might refuse to stay in bed any longer if she let it out and that would undo all the good his first day of rest in a very long time had done him and do permanent damage to his magnificent but still injured body. Neither of them wanted that.
‘He won’t fool me like that again,’ Max said gruffly ‘and I don’t need a noxious potion rubbed into my skin for no good reason. I heal quickly and I shall soon be up and about again without any help from that stuff.’
‘No, you won’t, the doctor said you must spend at least a week resting in bed and that’s what you will do, even if we have to hide all your clothes so you can’t get up. It’s for your own good,’ she added and his frown went even darker.
She went to pull back the sheets to get at his sore body whether he wanted her to or not. ‘No,’ he yelped and they tussled for a brief moment before she held up her hands and backed away, shaking her head at him in disgust.
‘You are worse than my girls, but have it your own way. I always thought your mother should be told you have fallen and injured yourself,’ she said cunningly and pretended she was off to send an urgent message to Flaxonby Dower House. She smiled when she got as far as the door and heard his horrified groan to say no, that wasn’t a good idea and she knew she had won.
‘Go on then, but don’t blame me,’ he said gloomily.
By the time she got back to the bed he had managed to whip off his nightshirt in record time and was lying face down on the bottom sheet with his head buried in his pillow and resistance in every line of his mighty and very male body. Her heart turned over at the sight of the bruises already marking his skin. She hated the thought of putting any pressure on places that already looked so sore, but if the doctor said this stuff would help him get better, she had to believe he knew what he was talking about.
Yet now she had got her way she wasn’t quite sure what do with it. She eyed Max’s naked back and flinched at the thought of feeling his warm skin and so much difference from her own much slighter frame under her massaging hands. No, she had to do this and it was high time she stopped being such a coward. This was to help him recover and she had promised herself yesterday she would do anything to bring that about.
She still winced as if she could feel the pain in his poor bruised back from here and no wonder he was being so cantankerous about it. She braced her shoulders and shook the bottle the doctor had handed her with instructions to use it and ignore her husband’s protests he was perfectly all right and it was ridiculous to expect him to stay in bed for more than a day, let alone for the week it would take for him to be well enough to get up without doing himself some permanent damage.
‘It smells surprisingly pleasant,’ she said huskily. She heard her own mixed feelings about doing this in her voice and she didn’t want him to know about them.
‘Becky would probably do it, or what about Sam—he’s used to rubbing his foul-smelling lotions and potions into the horses and swears he knows what he’s doing.’
‘To horses! And what kind of mother do you think I am not to know about rubbing whatever needs rubbing into my girls when they are ill or sore, Max?’ she said and heard him sigh as if she was being ridiculous to even want to do this herself.
‘I’m not a child,’ he said as if she had offended him yet again. ‘But if you insist on doing this, please hurry up and get it over with,’ he added and still refused to turn his head and look at her.
She frowned down at his tense back and poured a few drops of the oily, aromatic lotion into her palm, then rubbed her hands together to warm it while she gathered her courage and wondered which bits of him needed the healing stuff most. She gulped at the sight of so much muscular man laid bare for her wifely attentions and he sighed again as if he could read her mind and was trying not to think about them either.
‘It isn’t midsummer any more, Georgia. I will take cold waiting for this latest piece of unnecessary fussing if you don’t hurry up,’ he told her in a clipped but muffled voice that told her he was on the edge of sending her away and demanding Becky or Sam’s attentions instead. She could not endure the thought of anyone else touching him as she should be and they would know it was because he could not endure her touch if she backed down now.
‘Very well,’ she said, but still started at the sensation of his vital warmth under her tentative fingers when she started on one of his shoulders. It seemed less intimate to begin there and she might gather more courage as she worked her way down his back and narrow hips to the tightly masculine backside beginning to show the worst of his bruises where most of his weight had landed when he fell. She muffled a gasp of shock at the feel of his heavily muscled shoulders so tense under her fingers.
‘Please don’t fight me, Max,’ she murmured, ‘this won’t do any good at all if you resist my touch. The doctor said I must massage the stuff in as thoroughly as I could if it was to do your hurts and bruises any good.’
‘Go on then,’ he said, turning his head on the pillow just far enough to speak and give vent to a long-suffering sigh.
She felt him trying to let his muscles go slack under her fingers, but it didn’t seem to be working. He felt so stiff and sore she massaged more deeply and thought she heard a muffled groan as the knots under her exploring fingers loosened while the rest of him seemed tenser than ever. She smoothed the stuff into his other shoulder, but it felt so awkward to lean across him to get both her hands on him and try to unknot the worst of his stiffness.
She frowned and tried to twist her body at a sharp enough angle, but his shoulders were so broad she had trouble even reaching his other one from this side of the bed. He felt so powerful as she tried to probe the tensest spots and soothe them with her probing fingers. She was so absorbed in learning the feel of so much masculine power under her massaging palms that she almost forgot why she was doing this and let out an approving little purr of satisfaction because there wasn’t an ounce of extraneous fat on him.
Curiosity was threatening to take over from her fear and shyness and now she wanted to touch him with sensual intent and that wouldn’t do at all! Even if she really wanted to do so he was in pain and all gruff and vulnerable and she had to fight such tenderness for him that it almost took her breath away.
For a choking moment she recalled the feel of Edgar’s far less impressive body looming over her in bed as he took his pleasure and gave her none. She nearly flinched away from Max as her old fears threatened to overcome her concern for him, but a mighty shiver shook him from head to toe before she felt him force himself to go still again. Maybe he was cold and she pushed her bad memories aside because Max was the only man who mattered to her now and the only one who ever would. Edgar had no place in her life—he had no place anywhere now and she told his fading spirit he was not important and how bitterly he would have hated that fact.
She reached for the bottle again because she wasn’t here to ask Max to teach her how to make love with him instead of enduring an act with nothing to do with love as she had to before. Maybe one day she could do just that—no, maybe she would quite soon—but it couldn’t be today. She wasn’t quite brave enough to want it to be now yet and he was injured as well as impatient to be up and away.
Time to concentrate on why she was here right now and that was for his benefit and not hers. She needed to forget about her dreams of them together in this bed with a whole night in front of them for her to learn about loving him as he deserved.
She made herself focus on the moment. Max’s back was so heavy with muscle she could almost feel the hard work he had done for the last five years as he laboured to make his precious castle habitable and its estate almost prosperous again.
It felt so good to have an excuse to rub her palms over his taut skin and feel those mighty muscles with an approving hum, but she wasn’t here to enjoy free access to his prone body, she was here to help him. All the same she silently approved of him working so hard and honing his manly body to the peak of perfection while he did so. She frowned down at his broad back while her hands worked hard to soothe his hard packed muscles into relaxation.
He had stubbornly refused to use her money to speed the restoration of this hardy old place yet, despite him agreeing to take some of it under their marriage settlements before they were married. He was still doing everything he could himself here and it made her feel like an outsider. She would have to argue harder when he was up to it again, but for now she shifted and fidgeted to try to get her hands on both sides of him at once, but decided drastic action was necessary.
‘Have you finished?’ he asked hopefully and she frowned.
At this rate she would have lines before she was thirty. ‘No,’ she said curtly, hitching her narrow skirts up so she could climb on to the bed without falling across his body and causing even more damage.
‘What are you trying to do to me, Georgia?’ he said with something like a groan of protest.
She closed her mind to the notion he had more to moan about than bruises and a potentially damaged back. She might be having fantasies about him in her dreams waking and sleeping now and this certainly wasn’t going to stop her having some more, but she wasn’t going to do anything about them while he was injured. It felt as if it might be her fault he had driven himself to exhaustion as well and that thought didn’t sit comfortably with her.
‘The sensible thing,’ she told him as calmly as she could when it was an effort to get astride his legs without hurting him. The position felt so alien she almost wished she had finished as she got both of her hands on his body at last. ‘Just lie still and be quiet,’ she snapped as he seemed about to push himself up and away from her and the thought of all the damage he might do to himself seemed intolerable.
She managed to get her balance at last and fought a hollow feeling of insult and disappointment as she wondered why he didn’t want her to be this close to him even when he was hurting and this could help him.
He had tensed as if she had jarred every ache in his poor body while she braced herself over his prone legs to try to get a better grip on his damaged body without putting too much pressure on his bruises. She had been so careful not to hurt him that his unspoken resistance felt like a slap in the face.
‘Easy for you to say,’ he grumbled and turned his face away again so she couldn’t see him frown.
She had to try to judge what was helping and what was hurting him from the play of his muscles under his satin-smooth skin since that was all he had left her to go by. She could only gauge the feel of them unknotting under her probing fingers to get a sense of whether this was working or not. Maybe the doctor was right, she decided, as some of them did seem to smooth out while others almost seemed to knot as she touched them.
‘Apparently not so easy for you to do, though,’ she said tightly. She reached for the bottle she had left as close to the edge of his night stand as she dared if it was not to fall off and she actually felt him moan this time. ‘Did I hurt you?’ she asked urgently and he felt so stiff and resistant maybe this was the wrong thing to do after all.
Perhaps she should have ignored the doctor’s broad hints she should do this herself to make sure his patient could not just refuse to be helped by massage and his potions. Clearly the man was a good judge of character as well as a romantic and must think they were so recently wed that Max could not refuse her anything, but what did he know?
‘No, I’m perfectly fine,’ Max told the pillow on the side his wife should occupy if she had ever joined him in here. She had only come in here today for practical purposes, so why did that side of the bed seem like her rightful place when it was nothing of the kind?
‘I will soon be done now,’ she tried to reassure him.
She knelt up on either side of his long legs so she could put all her strength behind her hands and rub the slippery, oily liquid into his wide ribcage, the small of his back and his derrière, much sparser than hers.
Surely she didn’t really hear him mutter, ‘So will I...’ into his own pillow as he tried not to arch in protest against her massaging hands while she worked on the most severely injured part of his anatomy.
Of course she knew he was a man and far less feminine touches than these were supposed to arouse them, never mind how they felt about the woman who was touching them. She stopped her massaging to gaze at his back, glistening with oil and whatever else was in this strong-smelling mixture. She was near the end of her self-imposed mission and felt a jag of disappointment she didn’t want to think about as she ran her hands over his now glowing skin one more time.
She stayed where she was for a few tense, shamed seconds and wanted to run her sensually exploring hands over him while he was turned away from her and she could not read his thoughts and desires, or lack of them, in his dark brown eyes and react with tentative pleasure if he actually seemed to like it.
He was so different from her, so pared down and muscular that she wanted to stay here and explore him in ever more intimate detail. But he was injured and that was a shameful idea. She leaned over him again and put her idle hands to work massaging in the last of the sharply aromatic liniment into his shoulders and pretending it was for his comfort and not hers.
It was hard not to let out a sensual moan of satisfaction as she felt his vigour and promise under her exploring, gently massaging hands again, but there was no good reason for her to keep them there. She had to use up far too much willpower to lever herself over him and get to the edge of the bed, then slither back down to the floor with an undignified shuffle it was as well he couldn’t see.
At last her feet were on solid ground again and her skirts slipped down after her so she could reach for her shoes with her toes without even looking for them since she was still so guiltily fascinated by Max’s prone body she couldn’t take her eyes off him. She waited for him to say something since she couldn’t think of anything sensible.
‘Are you asleep?’ she eventually managed to ask him and eyed the back of his head and the prone body he was holding so still it felt as if he was willing himself to be so if he wasn’t already.
‘Not yet,’ she heard his muffled argument and almost wished he had pretended he was so she could slip away without saying another word.
‘I will cover you up and leave you to it, then,’ she said uncertainly. ‘If you keep the covers on and stay warm, I suppose there’s no need for you to put your nightshirt back on.’
‘No need at all,’ he told his pillow, but didn’t raise his head far enough to watch her tentatively raise the bedclothes until only his tousled dark hair was visible. ‘Thank you, I might manage to sleep now,’ he added from under them as she wriggled her feet into her elusive shoes and turned to go.
‘The doctor said I was to do it twice a day,’ she turned at the door to say.
‘Sam can do it,’ he said brusquely.
He turned on to the side away from her and drew the bedclothes into a protective cocoon so she felt she had no choice but to shrug and go away as he clearly wanted her to. He was so far from his usual vigorous self she didn’t want to even think about how much he must be hurting. Maybe she should have left him to suffer in silence and ignored the doctor’s orders.