Karen Robards - Amanda Rose

She thought she detected humor in his voice. When she struck a match from the box she always left beside the candle and touched it to the wick so that the flame caught and flared, she was sure of it. The flickering light made him look pale and drawn-and huge; his shadow crawled up the side of the cave like that of a dark giant-but a grin crooked his mouth and his eyes were whimsical.

“Are you a witch, Amanda? Or my guardian angel come to life? Although I must admit I never would have guessed that angels came with hair of such a devilish red. Or are you a hallucination? You’re certainly too good to be true.”

Amanda straightened, the movement slow and cautious, and eyed him uneasily. She was almost sure that he had been out of his head when she had first come upon him, and when he had first mistaken her for an angel. Was he going out of his head again? The thought alarmed her. A rational murderer was bad enough. An irrational one… She must have looked as nervous as she felt because his grin widened, and she could have sworn that his eyes teased her.

“Come on,” she said, hoping that cold practicality would restore his possibly wandering senses. Candle in hand, she moved toward him, a little apprehensive about letting him touch her if he was going out of his mind. Perhaps he killed only during fits of insanity… But it was too late to worry about that now, she told herself, and fatalistically took his arm and draped it over her shoulder again. “It’s not very far now, and then you can rest.”

“Perhaps you’re one of the devil’s angels,” he continued musingly as she urged him forward. “If the devil has angels, which I’m sure he must. He sounds like a smart old fellow. Perhaps he’s sent you to tempt me down to hell. Ah, well, lead on. At this point even hell sounds good. At least it’s warm. Or so I’ve heard.”

Amanda threw another anxious look up at him as they staggered along the worn stone passage that led deep into the cave. His eyes were very bright-with fever?-and his skin was so white beneath the scraggly beard and smears of blood that it frightened her. He looked as if he might faint at any moment. Standing so close to him, with his arm around her shoulders and his big body pressed hard against her side, she could feel the unnatural warmth of him even through the wet chill of his clothes. He radiated heat like a stove. He needed a doctor, she thought, but she knew it would be impossible for him to be seen by one. He would have to live or die on her ministrations alone-and his own strength.

When at last they reached the round, high-ceilinged cavern that was Amanda’s goal, she let out a sigh of relief. He was swaying, and Amanda knew she wouldn’t have been able to support him much farther.

“We’re here. You can rest now,” she told him, and gasped as his knees buckled. It was all she could do to prevent him from pitching headfirst onto the stone floor.

“Sorry,” he muttered as she eased him down and knelt beside him. He lay sprawled on his stomach on the stone with his head cushioned on his bent arm. “I’m just so damned tired.”

Amanda touched his shoulder anxiously.

“Just lie still. I’m going to go get you a blanket,” she said, feeling the heat of his skin through the damp shirt. “I’ll be right back. I’ll leave the candle.”

She left him lying in the flickering pool of light while she groped along the wall to a small passage that led off to the right. Although the candle’s cheerful yellow glow would have been nice, she had no real need of the light. In the almost five years she had been at the convent, she had walked along this passage hundreds of times-to the aged trapdoor that opened right into the convent’s deepest cellar. In the days when the convent had been a castle-sometime in the sixteenth century, she thought-the lower cellar had probably been used as a dungeon. Now it served as an almost forgotten storage room, and Amanda was as certain as it was possible to be that the sisters had no notion of the trapdoor’s existence. Presumably it had been designed as an escape hatch for the castle’s original owner and was forgotten later when the land was confiscated and presented to the Church under James I.

Amanda had discovered the door and then the cave quite by accident just a few weeks after her arrival at the convent. She had been hiding from Sister Boniface, who was determined to quell the small, red-haired, rebellious Amanda by whatever means were necessary. A lady of good family who had chosen the life of a nun in preference to matrimony and motherhood, Sister Boniface had rigid notions of what constituted correct behavior for schoolroom misses. Being kicked in the shin by a child she had properly been chastising-for swimming in the open bay while clad in only the flimsiest of undergarments-outraged the sister. But the kick had allowed Amanda to escape, at least temporarily. She had fled and eventually found her way to the very darkest corner of the lower cellar, where she had lain hidden beneath a pile of old clothes while the search for her went on above. Lying against the cold stone, shivering as much with fright as with chill, Amanda had felt something hard and even colder than the floor pressing into her stomach. Upon examination, it had turned out to be a circular iron ring attached to a door cunningly fashioned out of flagstones to match the floor. Not without difficulty, she had managed to pry it open. A shallow flight of worn stone stairs led down into darkness. Step by cautious step, she had descended-and found the cave.

At first its dark, winding passages and echoing caverns had frightened her. But over the years she had grown quite fond of the place and had got in the habit of sneaking out of her bed before anyone else was up and following the passageway down to the beach. Except for the few occasions when the smugglers had used it-and when she had been careful to stay out of the way-no one else had entered the cave since she had first explored it. It should be a safe place for Matthew Grayson to hide and recover his strength in. And after that, she thought, pacifying her unhappy sense of self-preservation, he would be on his own.

There was an old blanket just inside the trapdoor, and an ancient feather tick. Amanda sometimes wrapped herself in the blanket and curled up on the mattress when it was too cold to go walking along the shore. Even on the iciest winter day the cave never got much colder than it was right now, and it was an ideal place to read or think…

The blanket and the mattress together were awkward to carry, but they weren’t particularly heavy. Amanda lugged them back as quickly as she could. The sun would be up by now, she guessed, and she would be missed if she didn’t get back to her room soon. And then there would be all sorts of questions…

Matthew Grayson was still lying where she had left him; he didn’t appear to have moved so much as a muscle. Amanda felt a sudden spasm of alarm. Had he died? What on earth would she do if he did? But her fear was allayed as she saw his back move slightly. He was still breathing, at least.

She dragged the mattress until it lay beside him, then knelt to place a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“Mr. Grayson,” she said urgently, shaking his shoulder just a little. “Mr. Grayson…”

One eye opened blearily. “You’d better call me Matt,” he muttered, his words slurring.

“Matt,” she repeated obediently. “I’ve brought you a mattress. Can you roll over onto it? You’ll be much more comfortable once you’re off this cold stone, and I have a blanket for you, too.”

“See? I knew you were an angel,” he said on a note of intense satisfaction, and painfully rolled so that he was lying on his back on the feather tick. He needed to be out of those wet clothes, Amanda knew, but she drew the line at undressing him.