Jade Star (Star Quartet 4)

“Do you have bad cramps every month?”

She shook her head, still not looking at him.

“Does your back hurt?”

“No,” she said, looking now at her toes.

There was a single chair in the small cabin. Saint sat down and patted his thighs. “Come here, Jules.”

She looked at him, horrified. He only smiled at her encouragingly.

Slowly, color fluctuating alarmingly in her face, Jules padded over to him. He held out his arms, and she sank down onto his legs. He gently pulled her against him and held her.

He felt her tense with cramp.

“It will be gone soon,” he said, lightly kissing her hair.

“It’s . . . it’s nothing to you,” she said in a muffled voice.

“Nothing? What it is is natural. However, I do not believe in pain when it can be alleviated. Now, you just relax, and I’ll tell you about Louis XIV.”

“He was a French king,” Jules said.

“Yes, in the seventeenth century. He was called the Sun King. In any case, when he was born, he came into the world with two teeth. The queen, his mother, was appalled, and very wisely refused to put him to her breast. You can imagine the wariness of the two wet nurses. I remember reading that they were well compensated for their stoicism.”

He felt her ease, felt her head fall against his chest. He continued, his voice growing softer, “There’s another story about poor Louis. It seems that he had a rather embarrassing problem that involved his backside. He had what’s called a fistula. The surgeons operated successfully, and the courtiers, to show their sympathy for their king, proceeded to have similar operations!”

Her breathing was even and soft. She was asleep.

“For a while very few gentlemen in the court were able to sit down.” He eased her back into the circle of his arm. Her thick dark lashes were fanned against her pale cheeks. He hadn’t really noticed before that her brows and lashes were a dark brown, not a washed-out red as one would expect. And not one single freckle, even on the bridge of her nose. A nice straight nose, he thought. And a lovely mouth, a passionate mouth, the randy boy within him added. He continued to study her, perhaps really seeing her for the first time. “You’ve grown into quite a beauty,” he said softly, lightly touching his fingertips to her soft throat. “And now you’re my wife . . . and my problem.” No, he amended to himself, his responsibility.

He carried his sleeping wife to the bed and gently laid her on her back. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then shrugged. He stripped off his clothes and slipped in beside her. The damned bed was so narrow he could feel the warmth from her body.

When he awoke the next morning, he realized that he was precariously close to falling off the bed. Jules, he saw, turning to face her, was

sprawled on her stomach, her arms and legs spread, as if she were floating in the water. He was normally a light sleeper, but he’d never stirred, even when she’d begun her takeover. He smiled, then rose and bathed.

Dressed, he returned to the bed and sat down beside her. “Jules,” he said, gently shaking her shoulder.

A very heavy sleeper, he thought, and shook her again.

“Hmmm?” Jules pulled up to her elbows and slewed her head around. “Michael? What’s the matter? Where . . . ?”

“We’re aboard the Oregon and it’s morning, and how do you feel?”

Jules ducked her head and said in a muffled voice, “I’m just fine, thank you.”

“Good. Why don’t you get dressed and join me in the dining room?”

When Jules entered the long, narrow dining room on the main deck of the Oregon, she saw a knot of men, her husband in the middle of it. As she neared, she heard laughter, then Michael’s voice saying, “To this day, it’s called ‘burking.’ ”

“Good God,” one heavily whiskered gentlemen laughed, “and to think I’d believed medical science had advanced to the point of curing people, not killing them!”

Saint laughed, then spied his wife. He excused himself. “Hi, sweetheart.”

“You’re quite a storyteller,” she said, remembering his outrageous tale about Louis XIV. “What’s all this about ‘burking’?”

“In Scotland, not very long ago, a man used to supply the medical school with dead bodies for dissection. Unfortunately, he got into the deplorable habit of strangling people to get corpses. And that was called ‘burking.’ ”