As You Wish (16 page)

“Patricia, what’s wrong?” Ryan asked, smoothing her wet hair off her face. Her head lolled on his arm. Had she looked like this last night? How had he missed how sick she was? Why hadn’t he noticed the difference between the dry heat of fever and the moist heat of lust? What had David been thinking, kissing her when she was so sick? He should have been taking care of her, not trying to get into her pants.

“I have to go to the hospital,” Patricia whimpered.

Rainwater dripped from her lab coat, soaking him as he cradled her. She must have been lying there for some time. If he’d come out on time, he would have found her sooner. He might have caught her as she collapsed.

He should have known the heat he felt from her last night wasn’t lust; it was fever. “You have to go to bed, Princess.”

“No, Ryan, I can’t. I’m expected at the clinic. I have to help sick people.” Her voice sounded disjointed and hollow.

“You are a sick people.” Inside the door, the cold drizzle spattered the Oriental carpet in the entryway. As he carried her up the stairs, she dripped on the rich burgundy carpet. Her room was the first door to the left at the top of the stairs—something he really shouldn’t know.

“But they need me. It’s my duty.”

“It’s your duty to be healthy.” He sat her on her made bed. No way she had made it this well this morning, so she must not have slept in it. He should have checked on her last night. Even locked out, he could have looked through the windows. Had she spent the night passed out on the music room floor? He could have broken a window and climbed in. Or called the fire department to break down the door and the paramedics she obviously needed to treat her. He should have done his duty to protect her. He dropped her lab coat on the floor beside the bed after peeling it off her shoulders. Underneath, she was still wearing the green knit top and jeans she’d changed into last night, and they were soaked too.

“Ryan, I can’t do this now. I have to be at the clinic at ten, and I have patients to check on at the hospital first. Later, okay?” She slithered backward onto the bed.

Ryan lifted her feet onto the mattress and discovered she wasn’t wearing any shoes. Her feet were mottled white and red from the cold, and icy to the touch. He dropped her wet clothes on her lab coat, and wrapped the white comforter around her before picking up the phone. To his great relief, there were presets marked RITA HOME, RITA CELL, and RITA HOSP. He pressed the one marked RITA CELL.

“Ryan, I have to go to the hospital. People need me.” Patricia struggled to sit up but got tangled in the comforter. She flailed, trying to free herself. Her breathing sounded labored.

Ryan sat down on the side of the bed and draped his arm across her chest. The weight of his arm pinned her to the bed. “You just stay put. You’re sick, Princess. You can’t even stand up.”

“What?”

Ryan hesitated, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from. Patricia’s eyes had drifted closed for the moment.

“I think you have the wrong number,” the voice said, sounding amused.

“No, Rita—Dr. De Soto, I mean. This is Ryan from Well Spring Manor.”

“What’s wrong with Trisha? Why can’t she stand up?” Rita demanded, cool and efficient. Ryan heard the rustle of her clothes as she shifted the phone to a better position.

“She’s sick,” he said when the rustling stopped. “She passed out in the driveway trying to get to her car, and she’s soaked.”

Rita’s phone muffled, and he heard her say, “I have an emergency. I have to go. I’ll be back later.” Then the sound changed. “Okay, you need to get her warm. I can be there in about twenty minutes. Keep her warm and in bed, but you might have to tie her up to do it. I’ll bring drugs.”

The phone went dead.

“Ryan,” Patricia mewled. She struggled against the weight of his arm but couldn’t shift him. “Let me go. I have to go to the hospital. Mr. Petrivich is in with pneumonia, and he only speaks broken English. He’s ninety-seven years old. I have to make sure everything is okay with him.”

“Not today. Rita’s on her way.”

“Why? We’re not supposed to have lunch today. She’s got rounds.” Patricia frowned. “I’m pretty sure we weren’t supposed to have lunch. Can you call her and tell her I can’t make it today? I’m not feeling very good. I don’t want her to catch what I have.”

“She’s coming to take a look at you. You passed out in the driveway, remember?”

“I didn’t pass out. I just stopped to rest for a minute,” she grumbled.

“You rest in bed, not in the driveway in the rain.” He kissed her forehead. Her skin felt papery. “I’m going to go bring your bag in and close the front door. Stay right here.”

The storm had picked up since he’d carried her inside. Rain pooled on the marble floor, and the rug wicked water all the way to the hall. Mrs. Dudley would shoot someone if she saw it. Ryan pulled the door closed as he ran out to grab Patricia’s bag.

Stinging, cold raindrops the size of nickels pelted him. The top of her bag had popped opened when she’d dropped it, forming a perfect leaky bucket that now had at least two inches of water in the bottom. Before he went in, he poured out as much as he could without spilling clumps of drenched paper on the front steps. Then he carried it to the kitchen and set it sideways in the sink to drain before running back to Patricia’s room to see if she was trying to make a getaway.

Patricia had pulled on a pair of black pants and was struggling with the buttons of a yellow silk blouse.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Ryan heard echoes of his mother in his tone.

“I have responsibilities,” she muttered. She had buttoned the blouse crooked. At the rate she was moving, it would take her days to tuck it in.

Ryan lifted her hands away, flicking the buttons open. “Patricia, you’re sick,” he reminded her. She looked so pale and unfocused. Last night, through the window, he’d mistaken it for passion. She probably hadn’t even known what was going on. He slipped the blouse off her shoulders and knelt to get her out of her pants.

“Please, Ryan, we can’t have a session now.” She moaned as he carried her back to bed. “Can’t we do this when I get home?”

He drew in a sharp breath. If she said something in front of her friend, she would be humiliated. And then there was the fact that he’d just stripped her naked twice. Not something the average caretaker did in the execution of his duties. He caught her chin between his thumb and finger. This had to be some kind of abuse of trust, but after the abuse of trust he’d pulled last night breaking into her house, this was venial sin. “No, Princess, we have to do this now,” he said in a low, sultry growl.

She relaxed into the mattress, watching him wide-eyed.

Realization hit him like a fist in the gut. She wanted him. Even sick and feverish, she wanted him. She would obey if he told her to stay home from the hospital because he ordered it. He drew a deep, shaky breath. “I want you to put on your nightgown and lay here in bed. If you tell anyone about our sessions, I’ll have to punish you. Do you understand, Princess?”

She nodded.

Ryan grabbed an oversized T-shirt from the corner chair and tossed it across her knees. Then he walked out of the room. On the bottom step, he sat down, trying to catch his breath. It was because she was sick, of course. She wouldn’t have done his bidding outside a session if she’d been healthy.

But she had. He remembered too vividly the expression in her eyes that first day in the potting shed when she’d sunk to her knees. Lust, excitement…relief? Last night she’d begged him to stay because she’d wanted him. Even as sick as she was, her body responded to him. He ran his hands through his hair. He’d often wondered why any woman would want to be submissive, especially a woman like Patricia who had her every whim answered. But maybe that was why. She wanted to play at being ordered around.

He needed to remember he was only playing too.

He hadn’t realized how long he’d been sitting there until he heard a car pull up outside. Jumping up, he opened the door.

Rita ran in out of the rain. “Did you have to tie her up? She never gets sick, but when she does, she’s a holy terror.”

“She’s in bed,” Ryan said, taking her coat. He realized when she frowned at him that he was still wearing his.

“She is? Jesus, is she that sick? She didn’t look sick yesterday.” Rita started for the stairs, taking them two at a time.

“I don’t know how long she was laying in the driveway.” Ryan followed her.

“Laying in the driveway?”

“She was trying to get to her car and passed out.”

“Oh yeah, you told me. I forgot about that. Sounds just like our girl, though.” Rita swerved into the bedroom and stopped so abruptly Ryan ran into her from behind, bumping her forward two steps. “Wow, she doesn’t look dead. I figured she’d be at death’s door when you said she was in bed.”

Patricia was sitting up, her head cocked like she couldn’t understand why she was there. Her hair had half worked loose from yesterday’s twist and stuck to her cheeks and neck. Her gaze shifted drunkenly from Rita to Ryan and back.

Rita crossed the room and stood beside Patricia, flipping through an invisible chart. “Well, Patient 408, it says here you’re in for a coronary bypass.”

“I have to get to the clinic,” Patricia whined.

“That would be a great idea. Then you could give the plague to all the staff and patients. Maybe the city would have to be quarantined. That would be cool.” Rita sat down on the edge of the bed and located Patricia’s wrist in the blankets. “Those infectious-disease guys would be all over me because I knew patient zero way back when. Some of those cootie hunters are cute, y’know. Provided your plague doesn’t kill me.”

“People are depending on me.”

“Shh. I’m counting. I forgot to bring a nurse,” Rita said.

“I’ll be downstairs if you need me.” Ryan backed out of the room. Rita didn’t look up, so he hurried down the hall.

The rug was still wicking water from the pool in the foyer to the hall carpet. If he didn’t take care of that, Mrs. Dudley was going to have a fit when she came tomorrow. He rolled the rug up and dragged it down to the old drying room in the basement, where he draped it over a heavy wooden rack and left it to drip into the floor grate. Then he located the mop and started mopping the excess water off the floor. He couldn’t talk to Patricia like he’d planned to now, but the time would come. Those bright blue eyes that had been so happy to see him would dim, and her smile would fade with disgust. He had a reprieve, nothing more.

“So how did you manage it?”

Ryan looked up. Rita was closing up her bag as she walked down the stairs. “What?”

“Getting her to stay in bed. She said you told her to put on her nightgown and stay in bed. That never worked for me.”

Ryan shrugged.

“Yeah, that’s right. You’re the strong, silent type.” She set down her bag to put her raincoat back on. “So I gave her a sedative to keep her quiet for a while. Can you stay with her? I don’t like to leave her all alone, but I can’t sit here when I have to see all of her patients and all of mine. She might try for the great escape again.” Rita snapped her fingers. “Bruce’s grandmother is Serbian. She can communicate with Mr. Petrivich. Hopefully Bruce can communicate with his grandmother. Anyway, you have the number if you need me. I’ll stop by this evening and see if she needs another sedative. She passed out once in college because she got sick and wouldn’t stay in bed. Right in the middle of the quad. They had to call an ambulance and everything. Although I did get a date with one of the attendants.” Rita pulled open the door, and cold wind blew around his legs.

“Is she going to be all right?” Ryan asked. He should have taken a moment to look at Patricia last night. Then he would have known something was wrong. Instead…instead… “Do you need to call the Infectious Diseases Department or the Center for Disease Control?”

Rita paused with the door open. “Yeah, they’d love that.
Hi, I’m a doctor at Whitmer City Hospital in Whitmer, Ohio, and I have a textbook case of the latest head cold. Would you guys like to take a look
?” She grinned. “You watch too many movies. It’s just the sniffles. There’s three or four of them going around right now, and she probably has them all simultaneously. If she gets some rest, she should be right as rain in a week. If not, it’ll take longer. She knows that. She’s just got an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. It’s detrimental to her health. I’ll see you tonight.” Rita closed the door.

The house, all sixty rooms, suddenly seemed too small. Ryan waited until he heard Rita drive away before going upstairs.

Patricia lay asleep with the comforter tucked up to her chin like a child. Her face was still pale with bright spots of color on her cheeks. He noticed those spots last night but thought it was him. Stupid. If he’d waited another minute to go crazy, he’d have seen how unstable she was, how her eyes had glittered with fever, how she didn’t make sense.

He’d been too busy not making sense himself.

He knelt at the side of the bed and watched her sleep.
“I’ll be fine,”
she’d said last night before going into the house with David. But she hadn’t been fine. She’d already been pale with bright patches of color on her velvet skin.

Ryan stroked her cheek. He’d been too busy looking at David to look at Patricia and realize how sick she was. Watching them through the window, he’d been so insane with jealousy he hadn’t noticed she couldn’t stand without wavering. She’d hardly touched her food at dinner. David had been too consumed with pleading his case to see anything.

And I, Ryan thought, was too consumed with envy. He’d done more than just break her trust last night. He’d failed her.

“I’m sorry, Patricia,” he whispered. “I didn’t take very good care of you.”

She sighed in her sleep, nestling her cheek against his fingers.

He drew away so he wouldn’t disturb her. He needed to start making up for that failure. When she got better, he’d leave. Until then, he needed to redeem himself.

He gathered her wet clothes off the floor. Downstairs, he picked up the kitchen phone and dialed Mrs. Dudley. She used to be the full-time housekeeper in the mansion, but once Patricia went to college and Miss Beatrice moved to Florida, Mrs. Dudley had gone into semiretirement, coming to the house once a week to keep things up and for emergencies. Ryan thought this qualified as an emergency. Plus the old lady might club him if she found out tomorrow that Patricia had been sick today.