Patricia Rice by Devil's Lady

where the whores would have nursed him in the most pleasant of
ways. He could be there now with all that voluptuous beauty hovering
over his fevered head and cooing in his ear.
    Instead, he had a hysterical child in patched cotton
chemise wringing her hands and gazing at him with damned wide gray eyes
and tears.
    “Heat some water and tear up that cloth I brought home the other night. Then go back to bed. I can look after myself.”
    Ever obedient, Faith stoked the embers and added
kindling beneath the pot of water in the fireplace. Silently she climbed
back up to the loft and returned carrying a scrap of cloth from her
small store of possessions.
    Knife in hand, Morgan attempted to saw through the
thick buckskin of his breeches. The crude bandage he had tied about his
thigh earlier lay in a filthy ruin upon the floor, and the blood was
beginning to flow again. He cursed as his head spun and his hand
slipped. He should have kept a closer eye to that guard. He was getting
careless.
    Soft fingers curled about his, and he gladly
surrendered his weapon. She smelled of the fragrant soap he had brought
home to please her. He leaned back his head and closed his eyes as the
pain throbbed through his leg. He was aware of her gentle hands holding
his thigh while the cold knife blade cut along his breeches, but he was
beyond absorbing anything other than that he was home.
    It was an odd feeling, this warm sensation of
belonging somewhere. He was home, and in the morning everything would be
all right.
    Faith’s fingers trembled as she cut through the last
of the breeches leg. She could see the long, bloody gash across the
outside of his thigh, but she was not at all certain whether the gash or
the tree-strong limb made her more nervous. She had never, ever touched
a man’s leg before. The hair-roughened skin covered rippling lengths of
muscle that dwarfed her own meager limbs. Desperately she applied warm
compresses to the wound and tried not to think of what lay concealed at
the top of his bare thigh beneath the remains of his breeches.
    “Just wrap it up, lass. ’Twill be fine in a day or two.” Morgan’s voice was weary, and he spoke as if from a distance.
    Faith looked dubiously at the gaping wound, but the
bleeding was not such that it required more drastic measures. At least,
she didn’t think it would. Remembering her mother’s strictures on
cleanliness and the treatment of wounds, Faith reached for the bottle on
the table. She had a better use for the alcohol than rotting his
stomach.
    Morgan roared at the unexpected rush of stinging
liquor across his leg. His eyes flew open, and he glared at Faith with
ire at this betrayal, but she ignored the daggers he looked and
proceeded to tear her thin shift into long lengths.
    Morgan grabbed a strip of the threadbare linen,
discovered the suspicious remains of a bit of lace and a button, and
growled ominously.
    “What is this? Can you not follow the simplest of
orders? Bring me the bolt of cloth, and I’ll do it myself. I’ll not go
about with lace dangling from my leg.”
    Faith jerked the scrap from his hand and pushed his
palm hard against the padding she had folded over the gash. “Hold this
still. I cannot work when you wiggle about.” She removed the offending
bit of lace and the one button and carefully set them aside for other
use. “Unless you intend to go about as God made you, no one will know
what you have on. There is no sense in wasting perfectly good cloth.”
    “It is my perfectly good cloth and I’ll waste it as I wish,” he  snarled. “If you had other plans for it, I’ll buy you more later. I’ll not have you tearing up your garments for my sake.”
    “Did you think I could sit here for a fortnight and
do nothing but comb my hair? Your cloth is already made up into a
serviceable garment. I saw no reason to render it into rags. I apologize
if you are offended, but you did not say you meant to set up a