Page 34 of I Loved You Then (Far From Home #12)

His tunic was plastered to him, the linen clinging with sweat, and the heavy plaid half-twisted around his shoulder as though he had only dropped onto the bed, too weary to undress.

Claire tugged at the fabric, working the knot loose, but the weight of him—dead-limbed, fevered—made it near impossible.

She managed to drag the plaid free from his waist, baring the wrinkled, damp hem of his shirt, and set her jaw.

“All right,” she muttered under her breath, “one thing at a time.” She slid her fingers to the laces at his collar, tugging them open, then tried to peel the sodden linen up over his chest. The shirt clung stubbornly.

When she braced herself and pulled harder, his body shifted with her, the sheer bulk of him rolling heavily toward her arm.

She grunted, catching him, her breath hot with frustration.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she hissed. “Even unconscious, you’re impossible.”

The door creaked. Claire twisted to see Mungan entering with buckets swinging from his fists.

“Good. You can help me. I can’t get this off him by myself.”

Between the two of them, it was still a struggle.

Mungan lifted one broad shoulder while she tugged the fabric up, then propped him the other way so she could wrestle it from under him and from his thick arms. Bit by bit they worked the tunic free, finally yanking it over his head and leaving him bare to the cool air.

Claire straightened, breathless, the crumpled shirt in her hands. And then she looked. Really looked.

His chest was a map of survival: long, pale scars slashed across one shoulder, puckered marks at his ribs, a jagged seam low on his side.

Each wound told a story of how close he had come to death, and how stubbornly he had refused to yield.

Yet beneath that rough history lay a body that was, impossibly, magnificent.

Even in repose, his muscles stood out in sculpted relief, ridged and hard, carved by years of labor and battle.

Sweat gleamed in the curves, catching the light, holding her awed gaze.

Her pulse stumbled. She had expected scars, yes, but not so many, and not this—this stark beauty, this raw, almost brutal perfection. It was no wonder his character was as immovable as the cliffs around Caeravorn; his chest might have been carved from the same unrelenting rock.

She forgot Mungan was there. Forgot everything except the man before her. Her gaze lingered, drifting lower to where his breeches hung on lean hips.

Her cheeks burned when a low chuckle cut through her reverie.

“Shall I fetch more water, mistress,” Mungan said, a grin coming crooked, “or will ye be staring the laird’s chest into health?”

Claire’s mouth fell open. Heat shot from the pit of her belly to the tips of her ears. “I— I wasn’t—”

“Of course ye were’na,” Mungan said with maddening gravity, though the corners of his mouth twitched more. “’Tis fine medicine, I’m sure. He’ll be hale by sundown if ye keep at it.”

Claire scowled, snatching up a cloth and wringing it hard enough that water slopped over the bucket. With a brisk sternness she’d learned from her former manager, Claire thinned her lips and informed the old rascal, “I just can’t believe all the scars.”

“Aye,” Munga said, nodding, one brow lifting and then lowering. And then, as deadpan as he’d been, he added, “Aye, I ken that’s what held yer regard so dearly—the scars on the man.”

All right, so she wasn’t fooling him. Whatever.

“I get the feeling you’re a troublemaker,” she remarked.

“Might be,” Mungan allowed. “Though I ken there’s a bit of that in ye, eh?”

With mock severity, her eye still on Ciaran, she denied any such thing. “Me? Not at all.”

“Aye, says ye.”

***

Heat pressed down on him like a forge gone mad.

He fought to open his eyes, but they were leaden, sealed shut.

The world came only in fragments—snatches of voices, the faint sting of cool cloths against his skin, the sound of water being wrung and sloshed.

Yet none of it was strong enough to stop him from drifting.

The heat dragged him under again, down into the pit of memory.

He was standing at Berwick again, a green lad seeing war up close for the first time.

His boots sank in the mire as he bent toward the crumpled body at the edge of the heather.

She moved—fingers clawing feebly at the earth.

He crouched, gathered her as he once had, easing her into his arms. Her head lolled against his shoulder, but when he turned her face toward him, it was not the stranger from that day.

It was Claire.

Her gray eyes flickered open, finding his.

Claire wore the same serene expression the woman had worn that day, frightened but resigned.

Her lips were bloodied, trembling. His heart seized, twisting painfully in his chest. He could not breathe.

The memory was wrong, impossible, but somehow Claire was dying in his arms.

Nae, he rasped, though in truth no sound left his mouth. The word only roared inside him.

Her lips moved. At Berwick, he remembered only the faint breath of I’ve been waiting for you.

But then it was Claire speaking those words to him, at Caeravorn. And then the words themselves were different.

“You’ll be all right, Ciaran.”

He flinched as if struck. No! She was the one bleeding out, her blood hot and slick against his hands.

“Claire.” He clutched her tighter, frantic, but her form was already dissolving, sliding away from him like smoke in the wind.

No!

The cry never reached his lips. He was sinking again, into blackness, but her voice lingered, too strong for a woman dying.

“Stay with me, Ciaran.”

***

By the time Claire returned to Ciaran’s chamber that evening, her limbs felt like lead.

She had spent the day running herself ragged between the sick house, the flu house—as she’d begun to think of it—and Ciaran’s chamber, forcing herself to remain strong and practical as she soothed frightened mothers and reassured weary children.

But it was Diarmad who had frayed her last nerve.

Recovered now from his drunken stupor—Claire suspected Mungan had a hand in that—the man had reasserted himself with all the bluster of an incompetent physician certain of his own faulty wisdom.

He was adamant that bleeding the fevered ones was the only remedy worth pursuing, and worst of all, he meant to begin with Ciaran.

Claire had nearly lost her composure. “Over my dead body will you put one leech on him,” she had snapped, startling half the soldiers in the sick house. “Or on anyone else. It’s barbaric.”

Diarmad’s face had turned blotchy with indignation. “It has ever been the cure. The blood carries the corruption. Drain it, and the patient recovers.”

This came by way of Mungan’s translation.

“The blood carries oxygen,” Claire had corrected. “It carries life.” Her voice had risen, sharp enough to cut. “Take it away, and you weaken them. You’ll kill them faster, not save them.”

Diarmad had scoffed, muttering about ignorant women meddling in men’s matters—a hapless Cory had translated that part—but Claire refused to back down.

She’d turned to Mungan, who had been hovering with the air of a man caught between loyalty and common sense.

“You’re going to listen to him? A drunk?

—who might still be drunk for all we know?

You would trust him with Ciaran’s life?”

Mungan had opened his mouth, then closed it again, looking more uncomfortable than she had ever seen him.

Claire had pressed her advantage, her voice ringing out with authority. “No leeches. Not here, not now, not ever. If you want to try it, you’ll have to get past me.”

There had been a stunned silence before Diarmad began sputtering again until he’d finally thrown up his hands and stalked away.

She’d faced Mungan, who’d rubbed a hand over his mouth, not looking entirely convinced of her position.

“Mungan, I would not steer you wrong,” she vowed.

“Leeches do not help, I don’t care what Diarmad or the medicine of your time says.

Please believe me, I wouldn’t risk Ciar—anyone’s life by making such a statement if I didn’t believe it.

If I thought leeching would help, I’d drop a hundred leeches on him, on everyone. ”

She sighed now, plopping down into the chair at Ciaran’s side.

She’d hated leaving him at all during the day, wasn’t afraid to admit to herself exactly how much she hated it. Every step away from the keep had felt wrong, her mind tugged back here no matter how dire were the other patients.

The chamber was dim, the fire in the hearth had been kept purposefully low.

He hadn’t moved. His great frame filled the bed as though even the heavy carved oak could not contain him, but his strength seemed swallowed whole by the fever.

His face was flushed, damp with sweat, his chest heaving shallowly beneath the cool cloth she laid there.

She wrung another cloth and pressed it to his brow. He shifted, restless, a faint groan catching at the back of his throat. Then his hand stirred at his side, lifting, fingers groping weakly, as though searching for something unseen.

Without thinking, Claire caught his hand in both of hers.

The change was immediate. The restless movements eased, his breathing became calmer.

His hand dwarfed hers, hot and heavy, but his fingers curled weakly around her own, clutching her fingers as if he had found the thing he’d been looking for.

Her throat tightened, and she kept her hand tucked safely in his, watching the rise and fall of his chest in the wavering firelight.

After a long while, when his breathing steadied into a shallow rhythm, Claire eased her hand free.

Her palm tingled where his fingers had curled, as if he still held her.

She flexed her hand once, drew a breath, and pushed herself upright.

She couldn’t sit idly, not when sweat still dampened his skin, leaving him restless and burning.

Earlier, before she had gone out to tend the others, she had pressed Mungan and Mairi into a task she could not do herself—stripping the laird of his breeches and drawers, and bathing his lower half. The captain had grumbled, but she had returned to find Ciaran no longer bound in sodden layers.

Before she reached for the basin, she tried first to get broth into him.

She propped his head with one hand, spooned slowly with the other, and waited with each mouthful to see if he would swallow.

Sometimes he did, his throat working weakly; other times the liquid dribbled past his lips, and she had to wipe it away with the edge of the cloth.

It was painstaking work, testing all her patience, but she kept at it until she was satisfied he’d had enough.

Only then did she ease his head back to the pillow.

She fetched fresh water from the basin and wrung out a cloth until it dripped cool against her knuckles.

Returning to the bed, she set to work again, same as she had already twice today, drawing the cloth over the breadth of his chest and shoulders, down his arms, across the fever-hot lines of his ribs.

Even now, with his strength lax, his body bore the mark of a warrior, muscle hard and defined, a frame built for war.

She told herself to look at him as she would a patient in the hospital back home, just another man in need of care.

But she wasn’t blind. Nor immune. Each sweep of her hand reminded her of what he was, formidable, powerful even in this state, and so beautiful.

“God, you stubborn man,” she muttered, dragging the cloth across his collarbone and down the length of his arm. He twitched once, as though her touch stirred him, but did not wake. “Just fight the fever the same way you seem to challenge me at every opportunity.”

His lips moved. The words echoed faintly, broken but clear enough.

“Dinna die, Claire.”

Claire froze, the cloth suspended above him. Her heart lurched against her ribs. He sounded so raw, so desperate, that she leaned closer, searching his face. His eyes were shut, lashes damp against flushed cheeks, but his lips shaped the words again, barely a breath.

He thought she was dying.

“Oh, no,” she moaned with sympathy. “I’m not dying, Ciaran.

I’m right here,” she promised him, smoothing her palm along his cheek.

“Ciaran? Listen to me: I’m not dying. I’m alive and well.

” She brushed a strand of damp hair from his brow with her fingers.

On impulse, she lowered her face and kissed his forehead, just a soft, slow peck.

“I won’t die, Ciaran,” she whispered. “And you won’t die. I won’t allow it.”

Whether he heard her or not, she couldn’t say. But the hard lines of his face eased, just barely, as if her vow or maybe her kiss had reached him, in whatever place the fever had dragged him.