The Virtuous Widow. Anne Gracie

your head again.” This time she was ready when he lurched forward and stumbled into her room. She managed to steer him to the small curtained-off alcove where her bed stood. He sprawled across it with a groan and lay there, unmoving. She collapsed beside him, gasping for breath, weak with relief. Her breath clouded visibly in the icy air. She had to get him covered, while he was still warm from the exertion of the climb.

      She had no nightshirt for him to wear. He was too broad in the shoulders and chest for any of her clothing and she had long ago sold anything of Hart’s that remained. The few thin blankets she had did not look warm enough to keep an unconscious man from catching a chill. The thickest, warmest coverings were on Amy’s bed.

      She wrapped him in a sheet and tugged the covers over him. She took all the clothes she possessed and spread them out over the bed—dresses, shawls, a faded pelisse, a threadbare cloak—any layer of cloth which would help keep out the cold. She fetched the hot brick and set it at his feet. Then she stood back. She could do no more. She was shivering herself, she realised. And her feet were frozen. She normally got into bed to keep warm.

      But tonight there was a strange man in her bed.

      Amy’s bed was only a narrow bench, as long and as wide as a child. No room for Ellie there. Downstairs, the fire was dying. Ellie sat on the wooden stool, drew her knees against her chest and wrapped her shawl even tighter around herself in an illusion of warmth. She had used up all her extra clothes to make the bed warm for the stranger. She stared across at him. He lay there, warm, relaxed, comfortable while she hugged herself against the cold. He had collapsed. He was insensible. He wouldn’t know she was there.

      She crept to the edge of the bed on frozen toes and looked at him. He lay on his back, his breathing deep and regular. In the frail light of the candle the bandage glimmered white against his tanned skin and the thick, dark, tousled hair. There was a shadow of dark bristle on his lean, angular jaw. He seemed so big and dark and menacing in her bed. He took up much more of it than she did. And what if he woke?

      She couldn’t do this. She crept back to her stool. The chill settled. Drafts whispered up at her, insinuating themselves against her skin, nibbling at her like rats. Her chattering teeth echoed a crazed counterpoint to his deep, even breaths.

      She had no choice. It was her bed, after all. It would do nobody any good if she froze to death out here. What mattered propriety when it came to her very health? She ran downstairs again and fetched her frying pan. She took a deep breath, wrapped the sheet more tightly around herself and stepped into the sleeping alcove, frying pan in hand. Feeling as if she were burning her bridges, she closed the curtains which kept the cold drafts out. In the tiny, enclosed space, she felt even more alone with the stranger than ever…

      Outside, pellets of hail beat against her window.

      Carefully, stealthily, Ellie tucked the pan under the edge of the mattress, comfortingly to hand, then crept under the bedclothes. He wasn’t just in her bed, he took up most of the space. And almost all of the bedclothes. Without warning, she found herself lying hard against him, full length, his big body touching hers from shoulder to ankle. Threadbare sheets were all that lay between them. Ellie went rigid with anxiety. She poked him. “Hsst! Are you awake?” Her hand hovered, ready to snatch up the pan.

      He didn’t move; he just lay there, breathing slowly and evenly as he had for the last fifteen minutes. She tried to move away from him, but his weight had caused the mattress to sag. Her body could not help but roll downhill towards him. Against him. It was a most unsettling sensation. She wriggled a little, trying to reduce the contact between them. Her frozen toes slipped from their sheet and touched his long legs…and she sighed with pleasure. He was warm, like a furnace.

      Fever? She put out a hand in the darkness and felt his forehead. It seemed cool enough. But that could be the effect of the cold night air. She slipped a hand under the bedclothes and felt his chest. The skin was warm and dry, the muscles beneath it firm. He didn’t feel feverish at all. He felt…nice.

      She snatched her hand away and tucked herself back in her own cocoon of bedclothes. She closed her eyes firmly, trying to shut out the awareness of the man in her bed. Of course, she would not get a wink of sleep—she was braced against the possibility that he was awake, shamming unconsciousness, but at least she would be warm.

      She had never actually slept with a man before. Hart had not cared to stay with her longer than necessary. After coitus he had immediately left her, and once she had quickened with child he had never returned to her bed. So the very sensation of having a man sleep beside her was most…unsettling.

      She could smell him, smell the very masculine smell of his body, the scent of the herbal poultice she had made for his injury. His big, hard body seemed to fill the bed. It lifted the bedclothes so that there was a gap between him and her smaller frame, a gap for cold drafts to creep into. She wriggled closer, to close the gap a little, still lying rigid, apart from him, straining against the dip in the mattress.

      Slowly, insidiously, his body heat warmed her and gradually her defences relaxed. The combination of his reassuring stillness and the regularity of his deep breathing eased her anxious mind until finally she slept.

      And as she slept, her body curled against his, closing the gap seamlessly. Her cold toes slipped from their cool linen cocoon and rested on the hard warmth of his long bare calves. And her hand crept out and snuggled itself between the layers that wrapped him, until it was resting on that warm, firm, broad masculine chest…

      Weak winter sun woke her, lighting the small, spare room, setting a golden glow through the faded curtains that covered her sleeping alcove. Feeling cosy, relaxed and contented, Ellie yawned sleepily and stretched…and found herself snuggled hard against a man’s ribs, her feet curled around his leg, her arm across his prone body.

      She shot out of bed like a stone from a catapult and stood there shivering in the sudden cold, staring at the stranger, blinking as it all came back to her. She snatched some of her clothes and hurried downstairs to get the fire going again.

      The man slept on through the day. Apart from him sleeping like the dead, Ellie could find nothing wrong with him. She checked his head wound several times. It was no longer bleeding and showed no sign of infection. His breathing was deep and even. He wasn’t feverish and he didn’t toss and turn. He muttered occasionally, and each time, Amy came running to tell.

      Amy was fascinated by him. Ellie had managed to stop her daughter referring to the stranger as Papa, but she couldn’t seem to keep her away from his bedside. The weather was too bitter for her to play outside and the size of the cottage meant that if Amy wasn’t with Ellie downstairs, she was upstairs watching the man.

      It was harmless, Ellie told herself. And rather sweet. While Amy played with her dolls upstairs, she told him long, rambling stories and sang him songs, a little off-key. She told him of her special red wishing candle, that had brought him home. The child seemed quite unperturbed that he never responded to her prattle, that he just slept on.

      It would be a different story when he woke. If he ever did wake…

      She probably should have fetched Dr. Geddes. But she disliked him intensely. Dr. Geddes dressed fashionably, yet his tools of trade were filthy. He would bleed the man, give him a horrid-tasting potion of his own invention and charge a large fee. Ellie had little money and even less faith in him. Besides, Dr. Geddes was a friend of the squire…

      She folded the shirt, now clean and dry, and set it with his buckskin breeches on the chest in her room. Both garments had once been of good quality, but had seen hard wear and tear. There was nothing incongruous about a poor labourer wearing such clothes, however. In the last year she had been amazed to learn of the thriving trade in used clothing—second-, third-, even fourth-hand clothing. Even things she’d thought at the time were total rags she knew now could have been sold for a few pennies, or a farthing.

      She’d sold everything too cheaply, she realised in retrospect. Her jewellery, her furniture, treasured possessions, Amy’s clothes, her beautiful dolls’ house, with its exquisitely made furnishings, the tiny, perfect dolls with their lovely clothes and charming miniature knick-knacks—she