Diana Palmer - The Savage Heart

She wished that she could open her blouse and look at her arm because it felt wet as well as bruised under her torn jacket, but to do something so indecent in public would start another riot. She wondered how she was going to find the carriage and driver Matt had insisted on hiring to take her to and from the hospital and her suffragist meetings as soon as she’d received the nursing position and found the group of women she wanted to join. Her driver, Mick Kennedy, was a prince of a fellow, and she’d asked him to wait a number of blocks away from the demonstration for her. Now the streets were in such an uproar and she was feeling so very disoriented that she wasn’t sure precisely where he was or how to find him.

As luck would have it, Mick Kennedy found her. Worried by what he’d seen on the fringes of the demonstration, he’d hitched his team to a streetlamp, plunged into the crowd, and spent the last fifteen minutes or so searching for her. He was visibly relieved to find her.

“Hurt in all this, were you?” At her nod, he added, “Some mess, I’ll say. Shall I get you back to your boardinghouse?”

“Oh, yes, thank you, Mick.”

“Well, now, just take me arm and I’ll have you back there in no time, or me name’s not Mick Kennedy!”

In short order they were out of the crowd, and Mick was helping Tess into the carriage. His fine team was swiftly under way, drawing the impressive black carriage through the thinning crowd.

By the time they reached the boardinghouse, Tess’s arm was much worse.

“Shall I help you up to your door, ma’am?” Mick offered.

“No, thank you. I can manage.” She smiled, then made her way slowly up the steps.

Mrs. Mulhaney met her at the door. At the sight of Tess, dirty and disheveled, her hat askew and her hair coming down, she exclaimed, “Why, Miss Meredith, whatever has happened?”

“A man from the workers’ party infiltrated our ranks and provoked one of our number to violence.” Tess groaned. She leaned against the wall, wincing and nauseated, as she regarded the staircase with uneasy eyes and wondered how she was going to get to her room.

“Is my cousin Matt in this evening?” she asked suddenly.

“Why, I’m sure he is. I haven’t seen him go out. You wait here, my dear. I’ll fetch him!”

Mrs. Mulhaney rushed upstairs and quickly came back down with Matt, who was shrugging into a jacket as he walked. He eyed Tess with an expression she was too wounded to contemplate.

“Are you hurt? Where?” he asked immediately.

“My arm,” she said, breathing unsteadily. “I was trodden on, and I think it may be cut, as my sleeve is.”

“Can you send for Dr. Barrows?” he asked Mrs. Mulhaney.

“I can—and shall. At once. Can you take Miss Meredith to her room?”

“Yes.”

Without another word, Matt swung Tess up in his arms and climbed the staircase as easily as if he were carrying feathers.

She clung to his neck, savoring his great strength as he covered the distance to her door.

“Who did this?” he asked under his breath.

“There was a riot,” she explained. “I don’t know who did it. Several people were fighting, and I seem to have got in the way. My arm throbs so!”

“Which one?”

“The left one, just above the elbow. I didn’t even see how it happened. I rolled away from a very heavy man who was about to step on me. I remember a man with a cane looking at me before I fell, just before something stabbed at my arm. I think it might have been his cane. I wish I’d bitten his ankle.”

The mental picture of Tess with her teeth in a man’s ankle amused Matt and he chuckled softly.

“Here, open the door for me, can you?” he asked, lowering her.

She turned the crystal knob with her good hand and pushed the door open, trying not to notice the faint scent of his cologne and the warm sigh of his breath close to her lips. Matt shouldered into the room and carried her to her bed. He put her down very gently on the quilt that covered the white-enameled iron bedstead.

Wary of Mrs. Mulhaney’s return, he closed the door and then matter-of-factly began taking off Tess’s jacket.

She was panting, but not from the pain. “Matt, you…mustn’t!” She feverishly tried to stay the lean, strong hands that were unfastening her blouse.

His black eyes met hers with a faint twinkle. “Feeling prudish, Tess? You saw as much if not more of me after I was shot at Wounded Knee.”

“I was fourteen then,” she said, aware even as she spoke that it was a nonsensical answer. “And you mustn’t handle me…like this.”

“Where are all those slogans you were spouting about a woman’s rights?” He glanced down again at the buttons. “Don’t your more radical sisters even advocate free love?”

“I am not…that radical! Will you please stop undressing me?”

He didn’t even slow down. “With the best of luck, it will take the doctor a little time to get here,” he said as he worked buttons through the dainty holes. “I smell the blood.”

She started, having forgotten about Matt’s remarkable sensory powers, honed from childhood. If he’d ever been a child. Sioux males trained to be warriors from a very early age, learning the knife and bow and horsemanship as young boys, and getting a taste of battle by accompanying war parties as water carriers.

“Matt…” she protested, both hands going to the buttons to stop him.

He brushed her fumbling fingers aside. “I never imagined you to be such a prim woman,” he chided. “You and I know more about each other than many husbands and wives do.”

That was true. Intimacy had been forced into their relationship because she nursed him so long after his devastating wounds. Not that her father hadn’t had many qualms. It violated his sense of morality and decorum, but he had been unable to withstand her tearful pleas to be allowed to help.

“But this is…different,” she tried to explain.

His hands stilled for an instant while he looked into her eyes and saw the shyness there.

“I would do the same for anyone,” he said evenly.

She bit her lower lip.

He moved her hands aside very gently. “No one will ever know,” he said softly. “Does that reassure you?”

It was odd that she trusted him so much. The thought of any other man’s hands on her was sickening. But not Matt’s. They were immaculate hands, always clean and neat and so very strong, yet gentle.

The problem was that her heart reacted violently to the touch of those hands on her bare skin over her collarbone. She ached for him to do more than unbutton her clothing, though she couldn’t imagine what that “more” might be.

He pretended not to notice, and unbuttoned the last of the buttons on her blouse. Visible beneath it was a whalebone corset and, above that, a lace-decorated muslin chemise. At the sight of the dark points of her nipples through the muslin Matt’s hands stilled. A faint glitter claimed his dark eyes for an instant.

“You mustn’t stare at me like that,” she whispered.

His eyes lifted to hers. “Why not?”

She wondered that herself. While she was struggling for a rational reason, his eyes went back to her bodice and seemed bent on memorizing how she looked.

“Oh, this is very unconventional,” she protested weakly.

“And wickedly pleasurable,” he murmured. His hand slid from the buttons of her blouse to the edge of the muslin and she jumped as if his lean fingers burned her soft skin.

“You rake!” she gasped, catching his hand.

“All right.” He chuckled, letting her move his curious fingers back to the task at hand. “If I had any lingering doubts about your modern ideas, they’re gone now.”

“What do you mean?” she asked indignantly.