Her hands ceased to move and she met his gaze. “I will not. I will not leave this room until you stop making excuses! You say you love your daughter, but you won’t go to her when she needs you. You say you want to paint. But you sit in front of the easel and do nothing!”
He started to pace, but his normal, casually predatory stride was gone, leaving his gait awkward and… and pained.
Her eyes narrowed in confusion as the thought hit her suddenly. He was in pain. “Matthew, are you—”
He cut her off. With a vicious curse, he wheeled around and ripped open the pad of paper.
She could see his body shudder. Life seemed to freeze inside her as she watched, dread filling her.
“Let me show you why I sit in front of the easel and do nothing.”
He ripped a sheet free, the sudden, awkward movement sending a crystal vase flying to shatter on the floor. But Matthew gave it no notice. Her breath caught as he reached for a charcoal pencil, his long, chiseled fingers awkward and stumbling, his face pulled into a hideous mask.
“Matthew, don’t,” she said over the knot in her throat.
“Don’t?” His laugh was haunted. “Too late for that, wife. You want to see the truth about your husband? I’ll show you.”
He held the pencil, and she could tell that his attention suddenly shifted as he concentrated. Truly concentrated. Slowly, he put the pencil to paper but could only manage an unsteady line. He growled his frustration, then started again. He used every ounce of his considerable strength to draw—just draw.
It was as if he had forgotten she was there. He focused on the task, drawing sketch after sketch, each one worse than the one before as he started working faster and faster, each stroke more frantic than the last until the lead snapped against the strain. With a ferocious roar, he leveled the easel, pencils and papers crashing to the floor in a flutter of paper and clatter of wood and lead.
Finnea stared at the ruined supplies, her heart pounding so hard, the sound filled her ears. How had she not understood? How had she not known that Matthew’s anger was really about pain?
He didn’t paint any longer because he couldn’t. Physically he couldn’t.
Guilt consumed her. Guilt and despair at all she had failed to see. She thought of the many times she should have noticed. On the train when she had fallen into his arm. At his parents’ dinner party when he had clumsily knocked over his glass of wine. During their lessons. At the wedding. The times he had eaten slowly or not eaten at all. The times he had locked himself away for days at a time. Dear God, he had been locking himself away because he didn’t want anyone to see he was in pain.
“Matthew.”
His head was bowed, his chest heaving, his eyes closed.
“Matthew, talk to me.”
“Get out.”
“Matthew, please.”
“Damn it, get out!”
She stopped, realizing she had to give him time—time that she needed to decide what to do, because she understood then how she could repay her debt after all.
She would find a way to heal Matthew, reunite him with his daughter, then be able to walk away from this marriage without losing what was left of her heart.
Chapter Seventeen
“Take off your shirt.”
Matthew’s head shot up and he stared at Finnea as if she had lost her mind.
It was nearly noon the next day, and she stood inside the door to his study. She hadn’t had a drop of sleep, but she was exhilarated. She had spent the night making plans and writing out lists of all she would need. Earlier, she had searched out Mr. Quincy and given him the list of ingredients she sought. The butler had looked at her with eyes that glistened with relief and hope.
Barely taking the time to pull on a hat and coat, Quincy had dashed out of the house. Little more than an hour later he returned with the items he had been able to find. One more trip and he should have them all.
“What did you say?” Matthew asked.
“I said take off your shirt.”
Matthew leaned back in his leather desk chair, no trace of the ferocious desperation from yesterday. Calmly he steepled his fingers, his golden brow tilting, his mouth crooking. “Well, well, Mrs. Hawthorne. Have you had second thoughts and now want to consummate our marriage after all?”
A blush rushed to her cheeks, but she ignored it. “I want to see your scars—all of them.”
Plain and simple English. Blunt and to the point. Every trace of wry tilting brow and sensuality evaporated, replaced by a taut fierceness.
“No.” He pushed up from his desk and headed for the door. But she stepped in front of him, blocking the way.
“Please,” she said softly but with no less intensity. “I can help.”
His nostrils flared.
She reached out and laid her hand gently on his bad arm. “But I can’t do anything if you won’t let me try.”
He looked at the hand that touched him, and she felt the quiver of muscle beneath his skin. When he raised his eyes, he looked at her like a wolf caught in the iron jaw of a hunter’s trap, his face lined with wariness, pain…and near-dead hope that indeed she could help.
They stood that way as the fire hissed and popped behind the grate. After long minutes ticked by and he still said nothing, she reached for the fastenings on his shirt. Forcing her fingers not to tremble, she eased each button from its mooring.
He never said a word, though his gaze never left her face, the close scrutiny unnerving. She persevered, but she nearly faltered altogether when she peeled the fine linen from his torso and saw the scars.
She counted silently, concentrating, anything for him not to see the devastation she felt. Dear God, how had she not understood?
After thinking about it all night, she had woken up certain she could help him. She had seen wounds in Africa, had seen the medicine man ease all sorts of pain. But nothing had prepared her for the sight of Matthew’s scars.
They started at his shoulder and swept down his arm to his wrist, his hand left unscathed, making it possible to fool everyone into thinking he hadn’t been wounded except for his face. The scar that ran through his eyebrow and cheek was actually only one long slash, but the scars on his body looked as if he had been dragged across broken glass, the wounds healing unevenly.
Carefully keeping her face blank, Finnea took in the knotted and tense muscles.
But what stunned her more was the beauty of the rest of him. A sculpted perfection, much like his face, that had been marred by tragedy. Her fingers itched to touch him, drift along his skin. She took a long, steadying breath at the sensation.
Following quickly on the heels of that awareness came awe and respect. He had held himself together, showing no one the extent of his suffering. She was astounded that he had managed as well as he had. A lesser man would have given up long ago.
Just when she started to say something, she saw him tense, and a second later he tore his shirt from her hands.
“You’ve seen enough of the freak show,” he snapped.
“No!” she cried, grabbing his arm without thinking.
Pain seared through him—she saw it, saw the cords of his neck bulge out and his face go white.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped, leaping away.
He fell back in his chair, his eyes closed, his lips a thin bloodless line of pain. The room was silent and suddenly too hot. Finnea raged with guilt and ineffectiveness. She searched her mind for the right words to say. But it was Matthew who finally spoke.
“My guess is that garlic isn’t going to solve my problem,” he whispered, his eyes still closed.
She sucked in her breath.
“Yes,” he said at the sound, “I know all about your doctoring. Even if Quincy hadn’t regaled me with every one of your, as he put it, remarkable cures, I would have guessed something was up, since the house reeks of garlic.”
“Oh, Matthew,” she said, falling to her knees and taking his good hand. “I didn’t think when I grabbed your arm.”
With effort, he opened his eyes. Like a man moving in water, he lifted his hand and looked at it. “I’ve been to the best doctors in Boston. They say there is nothing to do but rest and let the wounds heal.”
“Poppycock!”
Matthew’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s a load of poppycock. You can’t just let the wounds rest. You’ve had plenty of time to heal—and plenty of time for the muscles to grow weak from disuse.”
The lines on Matthew’s face hardened. “I’ve seen the best doctors in Boston.”
“Yes, the same doctors who would stitch you up and leave you this way.”
He recoiled as if she had hit him physically. “I’m sorry,” she said with blunt efficiency.
“No need to be; you’re only speaking the truth. They say I must be suffering from deterioration of the brain due to the blow to my head.”
“That’s absurd.”
He eyed her, a hint of that earlier hope flaring to life, before he stamped it out. “My eyesight blurs. There is a tingling weakness in my right side making it impossible sometimes to do more than let my hand lie there like dead weight.”
“Sometimes.”
“What?”
“You said sometimes. Not always. I saw you pick up that pencil yesterday.”
His lips thinned. “And you saw what I could do with it.”
“Yes. I saw that you could pick it up and draw—”
He scoffed angrily.
“Don’t you see, Matthew? Perhaps you didn’t draw so well, but you did draw, proving that your arm is not dead weight. Sometimes it is like dead weight, which means that sometimes it’s not. Are you following me?”
The hope flared again, a wavering flame, but it was there.
“If you were losing the use of your arm due to brain deterioration,” she continued, “it would be consistent, and consistently become more useless.” Surely.
Her mind reeled. She was in way over her head. What did she know of such things? Nothing. But she did know about scars and scar tissue and how easily the body could curl up on itself if it was not worked properly. She had to be right. She wouldn’t think otherwise. And she couldn’t let him see her doubt.
With careful but determined movements, she got to her feet and pried the shirt from his grasp. He watched her, wariness mixed with hope.
He sat in a high-backed chair of fine supple leather, and she found that it swiveled. She pushed it just so, until the sun illuminated the wounds. And then she touched him.
She felt more than heard his intake of breath. This time she hadn’t hurt him—she understood that—but he must have felt that same shock of feeling she had experienced over the contact. He was so warm, and she wanted to press against him, seek his warmth. She knew if she stepped into his arms she would fit perfectly, like the missing piece of a puzzle.
Instead, she pulled her hands back and rubbed them together briskly to warm them. Then she touched him again.
With the delicacy of a butterfly, she traced the scars on his shoulder, wanting to understand their depths. When she felt some of the tension flow out of him, she touched him more firmly, feeling her way along the angry path down his arm.
The wounds had been deep, undoubtedly having severed muscles and tendons, the arm never given a chance to heal properly.
He seemed to hold his breath as she traced the scars, not a flicker of eyes or movement in his chest—until a knock sounded at the door.
He went rigid and grabbed for his shirt. “Who is it?” he demanded.
But Finnea didn’t wait for an answer. She hurried to the door. “Did you get everything?” she asked in a rush of words when she found Quincy standing at attention.
He extended several branches of powdery blue-green leaves and grinned proudly. “Yes, madam. I have the eucalyptus right here.”
“Grand!” She took the branches. “Give me a few minutes; then please have a tub of hot water drawn in Mr. Hawthorne’s bath chamber.”
Quincy went from proud to wary.
Matthew raised one dark blond brow. “Dare I ask what you plan to do with that?”
“You’re going to take a bath.”
The two men exchanged a glance before Quincy quickly left the room, and Matthew gave Finnea a look that heated her blood.
“Had I known this was the way to get you in my tub, I would have shown you my scars long ago,” he quipped with a devilish twist of lips.
But he wasn’t smiling thirty minutes later when he stood before the hot water.
“What are you doing?” she squeaked when she walked into the bath chamber off Matthew’s bedroom, a vial of freshly pressed eucalyptus oil in her hand.
His shirt and shoes were gone, and he stilled in the process of reaching for the fastenings on his trousers. “I’m getting in the tub, as instructed.”
“Without your clothes?”
He gave her a mischievous shrug. “That’s usually how I do it.”
She grimaced and blushed, mesmerized despite herself by the patch of golden hair on his chest that disappeared beneath the waist of his long pants.
“Is there a problem?” he asked, his voice rumbling along the hand-painted ceramic tiles.
Finnea felt moisture bead on her forehead and wrote it off to the stifling hot temperature in the room. “No, no problem. I wasn’t thinking.”
She poured in the oil, and the pungent scent of eucalyptus filled the room.
He coughed and eyed her, then made a sound much like a grunt.
His chest muscles rippled as he fumbled clumsily with the fastenings of his trousers. The hard creases returned to his face. She saw his pride mix with shame that he couldn’t work the fastenings. Her heart went out to him, but she knew that her pity did him no good.
Briskly, as if all were right in the world, she strode right up to him and began to work the buttons of his pants as if she had done it every day of her life.
“I don’t know how a body survives a winter in America,” she said, keeping her voice light and steady as she slipped the first button free. “Snow, snow, snow.” She undid another, then scoffed. “To think you said the snow would go away.”
He didn’t seem to breathe as she chattered, talking about everything and nothing, and eventually she felt him ease. But with the last fastening, her knuckles brushed against the strip of downy hair on his abdomen just as his trousers dropped to the floor.