What difference did it make? He'd not yet brought himself to mention anything about putting her affairs in order. His maman didn't have any affairs that he knew of anyway—there were those spiritual matters that the Reverend Hartman had been so eager to address, of course, but he could leave that to her priest. She didn't appear as if she were going to fail within a short time. She seemed to him to be improving each night that he visited her, with more energy and strength, but the doctor had warned him to take no comfort from that.

He sighed heavily, standing up. His nightclothes were in the bedchamber, but he'd sent the candle away with the boots, so he pulled his shirt over his head and left his clothes by the fire in the parlor. He padded to the closed door. The bedroom was pitch-black, the air frigid. He moved quickly across the cold f loor, feeling his way by the faint light of the fire through the door. The bed curtains were already closed, a good sign that the maid would have put a hot brick between the sheets. He climbed hurriedly into the warm cavern of the bed.

He froze in the motion of pulling the bedclothes over himself. A f lash of alarm went through him as someone turned over—someone waiting in the bed—he reached instinctively for his pistol, found himself naked, and then just as suddenly relaxed, lying back on the pillow with a low, surprised laugh.

"Callie?" he whispered, feeling toward her in the dark. Her warm, sweet hay scent filled the close confines of the bed; her hair was spread loose over the counterpane. He touched her shoulder—shocked to find it bare—and she responded with a sleeper's sigh, a delicate sound that spoke to his body like a wild f lute in a dark, beckoning forest.

He was instantly af lame for her. He had kept it brutally at bay until now, using every mental trick he'd ever learned from his grandfather and the considerably more crude methods he'd discovered on his own. He'd always prided himself on his self-control concerning women. In the circles he frequented, it had served him well on more than one occasion. At seven and twenty, he had no bastards or vengeful mistresses to trouble him. He conducted his love affairs the same way he conducted his business, with cold caution and ruthless disinterest.