“Not—completely,” Darcy Parker said. “You haven’t caught me off guard. Not at all.” Her smooth brow furrowed. “Are you all right?” she asked.
He ignored this question, trying to stay focused on the previous one. “As I said, my aunt reacted strongly. She told my father this relationship is—hurtling along too fast.”
“Ha!” said the girl in the knight’s suit. “See? I told you so.”
“Emerald, hush,” said Darcy over her shoulder. “You said you wanted me to handle this.” She peered more closely at Sloan. “Mr. English, you don’t look well. I asked if you were all right.”
He realized he was far from all right. But he felt compelled to finish what he’d started. “The two of them quarreled,” he said from between his teeth. “My aunt and my father. Now he refuses to talk to any of us about it. So I’ve been sent—as an emissary to your family. To see if you can…enlighten us about what’s happening.”
Her exotically dark eyes looked him up and down.
He hated himself for saying it, but he asked, “Would it be all right if I stepped inside, sat down a moment?”
“Don’t let him in,” said the girl dressed like a knight. “It might be a trick—like the Trojan Horse.”
Darcy’s face grew sterner. “Mr. English, I don’t let strangers in my house. Not under any circumstance. I’m sorry.”
He swallowed, suppressed a shudder. Her stare seemed to go through him like an ebony skewer, so he dropped his gaze to the bricks of her porch, which seemed to writhe and weave about in a most unnatural fashion.
“I understand perfectly,” he said as civilly as he could. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“That’s right,” she said.
He watched the bricks squirm and wriggle. He squared his shoulders and said, “Perhaps we can set up an appointment. Meet somewhere that you’d be comfortable. I don’t think I have your current phone number. I couldn’t find it. If you’d be so kind—I could call you, set up something.”
She was silent a long moment, as he watched the bricks slither drunkenly beneath his feet. His feet, it occurred to him, suddenly seemed a great distance from the rest of his body, and his pulse clanged like cymbals in his head.
She said, “I had to change the number. I’ve just had some new cards made up. I’ll give you one.”
“That would be excellent,” he said. Alice in Wonderland, he thought. Didn’t she get a long way from her feet? A very reckless thing for her to do…How could a person explain such a thing?
“A mosquito,” he said. The statement made perfect sense to him.
“Excuse me?” said the woman’s voice. It was low and soft, but it echoed. Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me.
“A mosquito,” he repeated. “In Kuala Lumpur.”
“What?” said the woman, and her lovely voice echoed the word again and again, as if his mind had turned into a cave.
“A mosquito in Kuala Lumpur,” he said with great effort. “I picked up some sort of fever. Not contagious. You needn’t be concerned. It’s not catching. I—I’ll phone you.”
The bricks were doing an interesting sort of polka now, way down there in the distance, whirling around his feet.
“I haven’t given you my number yet,” she said in her multiple voices. “Here—take it. Then I think you’d better go.”
She opened the door. On rubbery legs, he stepped back to allow it. The edges of his vision darkened and kept darkening until only she was left at the center of his sight. She seemed to glow like a flame.
She held a card toward him. He reached for it.
“You’re very beautiful,” he said. She had become luminous, and the words seemed so truthful that they were mystical. They liberated him.
He tried to take the card, but it fell, fluttering to the bricks. She looked at it, then at him, her dark eyes widening.
He looked into those eyes and began falling. He felt he was falling down into something without end.
DARCY WATCHED IN HORROR as he took one step, then another, and began to collapse.
He would have pitched face forward onto the marble of the entryway if she hadn’t broken his fall. He was a big man, but she managed to catch him in her arms.
She stumbled backward with the awkward burden of him. For a few seconds they were caught in a frightening dance in which gravity led.
She staggered, still desperately embracing him, and tumbled to her knees. But she did not relinquish him, and she kept his head from striking the marble. Clumsily she managed to turn him as she let his body ease to the floor.
“My God,” she breathed. She had felt the heat of his body; it had been as if the man had a fire in him.
Now he lay at her knees like one dead. She put her hand on his forehead. It burned and was moist with fine sweat. His breath was shallow.
“What’s wrong with him?” Emerald asked in a tremulous voice. “Did he have a fit?”
“He’s got a fever,” Darcy said. “Get me something to put under his head—now—quick.”
With apprehension, she put her hand over his heart. Its beat beneath her fingers was strong and regular. But the white shirt was damp to the touch, and through it she could feel the hotness of his flesh.
She studied his face in bewilderment. The high cheekbones had hollows beneath them, and she saw that his tan was recent and not deep, as if he wore it as a mere illusion of health.
She wondered if he was having a fever dream, for there was a frown line between the dark brows. He had long lashes for a man, and they gave minute jerks as his eyelids twitched. The corner of his mouth twitched, too, as though some tormented impulse in him fought to speak.
She resisted the urge to touch that restless mouth, to try to sooth it. It was sensually shaped, yet the lines that bracketed it seemed to have been engraved by years of discipline.
He was handsome, but too thin. She remembered the feel of his ribs jutting beneath his shirt when she had held him for those few moments.
Almost guiltily, she smoothed his hair from his forehead.
Emerald, clanking, came to her side, dragging something. “Lift up his head,” she said.
Darcy gritted her teeth and slid her hand beneath the man’s neck and up to the back of his skull. His brown hair felt moist at the roots. She lowered his head to rest against the cushion Emerald had brought—before she realized it was the bookworm.
“Not that,” Darcy rebuked, and threw Emerald a sharp glance.
“You said to get something for his head,” Emerald said defensively.
Oh, what the hell, thought Darcy.
“Should I call an ambulance?” Emerald asked.
“Yes,” Darcy said. She touched his brow again. “He’s burning up.”
Emerald arose with the clinking of chain mail. Darcy bent over the man to loosen his tie and undo his top shirt buttons.
Rose Alice burst through the front door. “I saw the whole thing,” she thundered. “I called 9-1-1. Don’t touch him, Darcy. Get back. I’ve got him covered.”
With a shock, Darcy saw that Rose Alice had one of Gus’s golf clubs and was brandishing it at the fallen man.
“Rose