To her alarm, he opened one brilliantly green eye, blinked it, and stared up at her. Sabine reared back and Bridget lunged with a yip.
“Bridget, please,” Sabine warned softly, staying the dog with her hand.
“Wh—?” asked the not-dead Jon Stoker, one eye blinking in the bright sun.
Sabine puzzled over this. Did he mean...What?Or,Where?Who?Why?
It could be any of these. And she had so few answers. She elected to stick to what she knew.
“It’s me, Sabine Noble. Er, Sabine Stoker. I’ve discovered you in a very bad way, I’m afraid. But not to worry. I’m taking you to my home and will soon hand you over to someone proficient in... in care.”
Sabine winced at her own words. It sounded like the same treatment one might give a baby bird, fallen from its nest. She looked at him. He was nearly dead, but he was no baby bird.
With no warning, he moved. A protest? Agreement? Relief? It was impossible to say. He affected an agonized expression and seemed to coil his strength and heave upright. That is, he endeavored to heave. Instead, he shuddered, seized, and then collapsed, making a spine-clunking collision with the bottom of the wagon. He closed his eye again.
Sabine let out a breath and studied his large body carefully, from the toes of his giant feet, bare as they had been in the morgue; up his long legs, covered only by a loose white tunic; over his faintly rising chest, his broad shoulders, to his bearded face. He did not move again. Thank God.
Bridget barked and Sabine scratched the dog idly behind the ears. “Only because he’s in such a very bad way, Bridge,” she vowed.
She thought about this and added, “What harm could there be?”
Another pause. She said, “He cannot even lift his head.”
She had not thought of his weakened condition as a failsafe, not in as many words, but it was true. She would never have accepted a whole and animate male person into her life and into her home. She would not have accepted a male person who wasconscious. Even her husband.
She leaned back and checked the traffic on the bridge for progress.
“Just for a day or two, until I can find someone else to take him,” she promised the dog. “The partners in his business are very fond of him. It shouldn’t take long.”
