Free Cates, Kimberly by Briar Rose

shut.

    Redmayne awoke with a jolt, pain shooting through his shoulder as he struggled to get his bearings. Something warm was pressed up alongside him, silky strands of sweet-smelling hair straggling across his jaw, the pillowy softness of a breast nudged his rib cage. Muttering a curse, he propped himself up on his uninjured arm. What the blazes? The woman had crawled into bed with him!
    He stiffened, drawing himself tighter against the outer wall of the caravan in an effort to put some space between them, frustration and something far too similar to alarm reverberating through him. He'd lost his virginity at fifteen, but never once had he spent the night lying beside any woman he'd bedded. Only a reckless fool let anyone see him in the vulnerability of sleep. Sleep... the place where nightmares stalked a man, and no amount of steely will could hold them at bay.
    And this woman, with her keen intuition, had already learned far too much about him when he was half unconscious, racked with pain, and cried out for his father. The possibility that she might burrow even deeper beneath defenses he'd always thought unbreachable was unthinkable.
    There was too much softness about her features, a terrifying tenderness in the full curve of her lips, her eyelashes, absurdly long and curled, lying in rich crescents against her cheekbones. She shivered in her sleep, closing the space he'd managed to put between them, her rosy cheek nuzzled against his bare chest.
    When she helped him cauterize his wound with the white-hot brand, it hadn't jolted him this deeply. Instinctively he tried to draw back farther still, but the wall of the caravan blocked any further retreat.
    God in heaven, what was wrong with him? He'd bedded his share of women, without so much as a ripple in the surface of his prized self-control. The most beautiful, most accomplished lovers society had to offer had viewed the notoriously omniscient Captain Redmayne as an irresistible challenge. They had amused him—their determination to crack his reserve, drive him to paroxysms of passion. And it had been diverting to observe their varying stages of outrage when they realized how little they had touched his emotions.
    Yet never had the most accomplished siren unsettled him the way this lone, tousled, dream-mad little gypsy had managed to. He probed the unaccustomed sensation for a long moment, gazing down into her slumbering features, trying to determine exactly what it was about her that had elicited such a unique response. One couldn't quell unwanted reactions, after all, unless one understood the root of them.
    Absurdly quixotic, fiercely innocent, tenacious of joy—Rhiannon Fitzgerald was the sort of woman who should have inspired nothing but ridicule in the cynical captain. Hadn't he learned early that "compassion" was only a prettier name for weakness, that "idealism" was the word used by cowards without the courage to gaze, straight-faced into life?
    Why was it, then, that his fingers itched to smooth the strands of hair back from her cheek? An innate need for tidiness, no doubt. Surely nothing more. Forcing his voice into its usual cool tones, he spoke. "Miss Fitzgerald?"
    For a moment she groped for the pillow, as if to draw it over her ear, block out the disturbance. Only then did Redmayne notice the dark circles beneath her eyes, the exhaustion draining some of the color from her cheeks. Why the devil should that cause him an unexpected twinge?
    "Madam?" he said a trifle more gently. Her eyes fluttered open, confusion and astonishment swimming in their depths. "Wh-what... who...?" She scrambled to a sitting position, then seemed to gather her scattered wits. "Are you all right? Is there something wrong?"
    "I must confess, I'm not accustomed to waking to find a woman in my bed."
    Her cheeks washed so scarlet he couldn't help but be vaguely amused.
    "Not that I would object except that you absconded with the pillow."
    "I... There was nowhere else to—to sleep...