She nodded at his explanation. “Are you… are you…” She couldn’t ask it; she didn’t know how.
“No,” he said. “At least they don’t think so.”
She felt herself sag with relief, and she had to sit down. She couldn’t imagine a world without him. Even while he’d been gone, she’d always known he was there, sharing the same planet with her, walking the same earth. And even in those early days following John’s death, when she’d hated him for leaving her, even when she’d been so angry with him that she wanted to cry-she had taken some comfort in the knowledge that he was alive and well, and would return to her in an instant, if ever she asked it of him.
He was here. He was alive. And with John gone… Well, she didn’t know how anyone could expect her to lose them both.
He shivered again, violently.
“Do you need medicine?” she asked, snapping to attention. “Do you have medicine?”
‘Took it already,“ he chattered.
But she had to do something. She wasn’t self-hating enough to think that there had been anything she could have done to prevent John’s death-even in the worst of her grief she hadn’t gone down that road-but she had always hated that the whole thing had happened in her absence. It was, in truth, the one momentous thing John had ever done without her. And even if Michael was only sick, and not dying, she was not going to allow him to suffer alone.
“Let me get you another blanket,” she said. Without waiting for his reply, she rushed through the connecting door to her own suite and pulled the coverlet off her bed. It was rose pink and would most likely offend his masculine sensibilities once he reached a state of sensibility, but that, she decided,was his problem.
When she returned to his room, he was so still she thought he’d fallen asleep, but he managed to rouse himself enough to say thank you as she tucked the blanket over him.
“What else can I do?” she asked, pulling a wooden chair to the side of his bed and sitting down.
“Nothing.”
“There must be something,” she insisted. “Surely we’re not meant to merely wait this out.”
“We’re meant,” he said weakly, “to merely wait this out.”
“I can’t believe that’s true.”
He opened one eye. “Do you mean to challenge the entire medical establishment?”
She ground her teeth together and hunched over in her chair. “Are you certain you don’t need more medicine?”
He shook his head, then moaned at the exertion of it. “Not for another few hours.”
“Where is it?” she asked. If the only thing she could truly do was to locate the medication and be ready to dispense it, then by God, she would at least do that.
He moved his head slightly to the left. Francesca followed the motion toward a small table across the room, where a medicinal bottle sat atop a folded newspaper. She immediately rose and retrieved it, reading the label as she walked back to her chair. “Quinine,” she murmured. “I’ve heard of that.”
“Miracle medicine,” Michael said. “Or so they say.”
Francesca looked at him dubiously.
“Just look at me,” he said with a lopsided-and feeble- grin. “Proof positive.”
She inspected the bottle again, watching the powder shift as she tilted it. “I remain unconvinced.”
One of his shoulders attempted to move in a blithe gesture. “I’m not dead.”
“That’s not funny.”
“No, it’s the only funny thing,” he corrected. “We’ve got to take our laughter where we can. Just think, if I died, the title would go to-how does Janet always put it-that-”
“Awful Debenham side of the family,” they finished together, and Francesca couldn’t believe it, but she actually smiled.
He could always make her smile.
She reached out and took his hand. “We will get through this,” she said.
He nodded, and then he closed his eyes.
But just when she thought he was asleep, he whispered, “It’s better with you here.”
The next morning Michael was feeling somewhat refreshed, and if not quite his usual self, then at least a damn sight better than he’d been the night before. Francesca, he was horrified to realize, was still in the wooden chair at his bedside, her head tilted drunkenly to the side. She looked uncomfortable in every way a body could look uncomfortable, from the way she was perched in the chair to the awkward angle of her neck and the strange spiral twist of her torso.
But she was asleep. Snoring, even, which he found rather endearing. He’d never pictured her snoring, and sad to say, he had imagined her asleep more times than he cared to count.
He supposed it had been too much to hope that he could hide his illness from her; she was far too perceptive and certainly far too nosy. And even though he would have preferred that she didn’t worry over him, the truth was, he’d been comforted by her presence the night before. He shouldn’t have been, or at least he shouldn’t have allowed himself to be, but he just couldn’t help it.
He heard her stir and rolled to his side to get a better look. He had never seen her wake up, he realized. He wasn’t certain why he found that so strange; it wasn’t as if he’d been privy to many of her private moments before. Maybe it was because in all of his daydreams, in all of his fantasies, he’d never quite pictured this-the low rumbling from deep in her throat as she shifted position, the small sigh of sound when she yawned, or even the delicate ballet of her eyelids as they fluttered open.