THE STRANGER SLEPT PROPERLY now. Gemma let her soft song fade away to nothing. It was an old trick, known by women through millennia most likely, anyone who would ever soothed a fussing child or wounded man or an ill elder knew the trick of distracting someone from their ills long enough for them to gain a bit of rest.

She set the folded cloth back into the pan by her side and took a moment to stretch in her chair. As she rolled her neck she winced at the soreness in her shoulder and the way her wrist ached.

She was certain that Mr. Bing thought her safely in her stillroom downstairs, far away from the outsider. Mr. Bing would not approve of her nursing the stranger by herself. He was protective of her, even fatherly in his gruff way. But her aches had kept her from her tasks and she admitted, at least to herself, to an abiding curiosity about the man she cared for.

It certainly hadn't been a romantic moment, being tossed from beneath the collapsing roof of the pavilion like a sack of flour. She understood that it was only a physical response, so she tried not to give credence to the way his effortless strength now made her catch her breath in memory. Yet to find herself lifted and held for that fraction of a second had been the first time she'd been touched by a man in years.

Her husband had been killed in a carriage accident more than four years ago, but Gemma felt he'd begun dying a long time before. He'd not reached out for her once in his last few years.

Seven years since she'd felt something like what the stranger aroused in her. Her gaze lost focus for a moment as she recalled it. Big hard hands grasping her waist, lifting her high.

Heavens, he is strong.

Furthermore, he smelled incredibly good. Not of cologne but of horse and leather and clean male skin.

Mr. Bing had stripped the fellow's clothes and dressed him in one of Dr. Oakes's old nightshirts. It was a pity that the voluminous linen did nothing to lessen the square solidity of his shoulders and the muscles rippling down his body.

He'd been beautiful and wild and strange, grappling with the ram, a medieval hero battling a dragon.

Now she was just being fanciful. Who would believe it? Anyone who would had ever met Gemma Oakes would never think to describe her as whimsical. But surely under her own roof, in the privacy of her own mind, she could have a moment of fancy?

It wasn't as though she had any attachment to this striking, otherworldly fellow. She suspected he was quite broken. A broken beautiful man. And she was quite sure she knew, more or less, what it was that had broken him.