‘No.’ She shuddered. ‘It wasn’t just a nightmare. It was Gideon...and...’
She went still. Her eyes narrowed.
‘What are you doing out of bed?’
‘You were crying out. So...’
‘I woke you? Oh, Tom, I’m so sorry.’
‘Lord, Sarah, you’ve lost enough sleep sitting up with me through my nightmares this past couple of days.’
‘That’s not the same. You were wounded.’
‘And you weren’t?’
‘I meant physically.’
‘Yes, but you’ve been through a terrible ordeal.’
‘I wasn’t hacked at by French cavalry, then buried for hours under a pile of rubble,’ she replied tartly. ‘Come on, Tom, let’s get you back to bed.’
He leaned back on his heels. ‘You don’t think I can make it there on my own?’
‘Well, I don’t know, do I? This is the first time you’ve been out of bed. And I don’t want all my hard work undone by having you go off into a swoon, or something. Then we’d have to wake up Gaston to carry you back, because I certainly don’t have the strength.’
He could hear the concern in her voice though she was covering it up by saying she was only being practical.
She’d just suffered a horrific nightmare, yet she was trying to put his needs first.
Although—he glanced at her as she got her shoulder under his and helped him to his feet—perhaps doing something for him was helping her to push the nightmare aside. After all, that’s what she’d been doing with him for the past few days. Nursing him had been salving her own hurt at not being able to do anything for either of her brothers.
So he let her lead him back to bed, where he meekly lay down while she tucked a sheet round his chest. The exertion of walking to her bed and back had dealt a deathblow to his arousal, thank goodness, or he wouldn’t have been able to look her in the face.
‘There. Comfortable?’
Not entirely.
He nodded.
‘Good. Well, I should go back to bed, now.’ She glanced over at the screen and gave an almost imperceptible shudder.
‘Don’t want to shut your eyes again, just yet?’ He reached for her hand, and she took it. Clung to it. Shook her head. Then sat down in the chair beside his bed, her back ramrod straight, her eyes huge in her chalk-white face.
‘And the last thing you want is to talk about it, I dare say,’ he said sympathetically. ‘I don’t think I could talk about the ones I’ve had, the last few nights. They were so hellish. Bits of things that had really happened, all mixed up with horrors I didn’t know I was capable of imagining.’
‘Yes—’ she gasped ‘—it was just like that. The bodies.’ She gripped his hand so tightly that it was only then he became aware that formerly it had been just about the only part of him that hadn’t hurt. ‘Bodies everywhere. All hacked to bits. Or lying in the street, begging me for water when I didn’t have any to give them. B-but they all of them had Gideon’s face.’
Her voice sank to a hoarse whisper, her mouth quivering with repressed pain and tears.
Propriety be damned. She needed more than just a hand to hold. Uttering an oath, he tugged her down on to his chest and wrapped his arms round her. Rocked her.
‘It wasn’t him,’ he grated. ‘He didn’t go through any of that.’
‘How do you know? How can you know what he went through?’
‘Well, I don’t, that’s true. But...’ He shifted uncomfortably. He’d thought he’d never speak of the things that had leapt up and leered at him through his fevered dreams. But Sarah needed to hear that what she was experiencing happened to other people, too.
‘One of the nightmares I had, over and over again, was about a woman. A pregnant woman we discovered after we’d driven the French out of a Portuguese village. It was about the worst thing I’d ever seen. But she’s been dead for years now. So why did she leap out at me again last night? Right in the middle of all the things I was reliving from the battle that had just happened? It is as if the worst things, the things you won’t allow yourself to think about while you’re awake, jump out to taunt you when you’re powerless to stop them.’