“All the time,” I say without thinking as I adjust the temperature of the water, knowing it can’t be too cool or she won’t be able to stay in it for long.
Suddenly her hot hands are on my cheeks, gently turning me to face her. “I’m so sorry, Jeffrey. That’s horrible,” she says with such earnestness I can’t help but laugh.
“I wasn’t serious,” I confess. “I was humoring you. I think you’re a little out of your head right now, love.”
“Love,” she murmurs seriously. “Yes, love is nice. But I told you, Jeffrey, I’m in a serious relationship with my work. And that’s it. I’m never going to fall in love.”
“Good to know,” I say, knowing any further discussion of her engagement to Andrew or the fact that she sent her sister to Gallantia in her place will have to wait until she’s in her right mind.
She nods. “I’m glad that’s clear. It’s very important.”
I nod. “Agreed.”
“And, I mean, do you seem nice, underneath the scowly exterior? Yes, you do,” she mumbles with another smack of her lips. “Are you sexy with your eyes and muscles and the swooping and the carrying and all of that? Well, yes. But…” She leans forward, resting her forehead heavily on my shoulder. “But I’m just so tired, Jeffrey. So, so tired. And the rest of the story is sad.”
I take her face in my hands, guiding her back until I catch her feverish gaze. “Are you going to be safe alone in this bath? Or do I need to stay here with you to make sure you don’t drown?”
Her breath shudders out, and something flickers behind her eyes, something that makes me imagine what it would be like to kiss her. If she weren’t sick and half out of her mind with fever, of course.
And if she weren’t my brother’s fiancée…
I’m ninety percent certain the engagement is off, or that it will be as soon as Lizzy is up to calling her sister and Andrew, but even a ten percent chance this woman might end up my brother’s wife is too much.
“I’ll be fine,” she whispers, shifting back on the toilet seat, pulling her face from my hands. “But I should probably take a pill before I get in.”
I nod. “Be right back.” I flee the bathroom and race up the stairs, grateful for the excuse to get away from Lizzy’s haunting gaze for a few minutes.
I don’t know what it is about this woman, but she makes me feel…scrambled inside. Scrambled and hopeful in ways I shouldn’t be hopeful. She’s absolutely off limits. “Off-limits,” I remind myself aloud, but the hope candle burning inside me only flares brighter.
Stupid candle, dangerous candle.
But I can’t deny the warmth of it feels nice.
6
Elizabeth
I am desperately ill for what feels like an eternity.
Each evening when Jeffrey tucks me into bed, I insist I’ll be right as rain come morning, and each morning I wake feeling achy and strange and so floaty I can’t remember getting out of bed.
I space out and come back into my body already curled on the couch upstairs or slumped at the kitchen table with a cup of tea steaming in front of me. Other times, I wake up in the closet or in the chair in the corner of my bedroom or…out on the foldout sofa in the library with Jeffrey, curled against his side with my face tucked into his warm armpit like a puppy in search of comfort and spicy smells.
But of course, his armpit isn’t spicy. At least, not in a bad way.
The General’s armpit is as fastidiously clean and well-groomed as the rest of him.
I take to calling him that on—I think—Day Two of The Sickness, after he orders me back to bed for the seventh time, insisting I need rest, not to dust the books and rearrange them in alphabetical order. But the steroids he fetched from the pharmacy in Islip Downs, along with all the other meds for what a Gallantian royal doctor Jeffrey consulted by phone suspects is a raging case of pneumonia, make me itchy beneath the skin.
I keep wanting to do something, but every time I take out a sewing project or start dragging books off shelves, I end up sitting on the floor, dizzy and winded and trying out my new curse words.
In between ordering me back to bed and insisting I take my meds on a firm schedule, Jeffrey teaches me colorful new swear words in Russian and French, two languages he speaks that I do not.
Sometimes, after a lesson, I make him keep talking to me in French because I like how it feels when the words rumble his ribs as I lie with my head on his chest.
We lie snuggled together on the couch or in his bed or in my bed far too often for two people who are “just friends,” but in my feverish, sickly state, I don’t worry about it too much. And when he offers to carry me to my bed on what I think is the fourth night of our increasingly odd relationship, I wrap my arm tighter around his waist and shake my head. “No. I want to sleep here.”