Read Online Until You by Judith McNaught - Free Book Online Page B

most feminine bouts of delicate tears. Even in his sleep, Stephen knew that.
    Her crying promptly escalated to serious, anguished weeping, punctuated with gulped breaths and shuddering. Whatever he'd done to cause
this
outburst, it was far more than merely forgetting to compliment her gown or breaking an engagement for the theatre. This outburst was going to cost him a diamond necklace!
    A convulsive sob shook her entire body along with the bedcovers.
    And a matching bracelet.
    Exhausted in body and spirit, he drifted deeper into slumber, reaching for the bliss of it, but something she'd said was holding him back, tugging at him. "I
don't know how I look… don't know… don't know
."
    Stephen's eyes snapped open, and he jerked his head toward her. She'd turned her face away and covered her mouth with her left hand in an attempt to silence her cries, but shudders were still racking her body. Her eyes were closed, but tears were trickling steadily from beneath her long wet lashes and streaking down her pale cheeks. She was weeping her heart out, but she was fully conscious and lucid, and his relief at that outweighed his guilt over her tears.
    "I wasn't awake enough to understand your question before," he said quickly. "I apologize."
    Her body stiffened at the sound of his voice, and he saw the gallant struggle she made to bring herself under control before she turned her head on the pillow and looked at him.
    "What's wrong?" he said carefully, gentling his voice to what he hoped was a soothing tone.
    Sheridan swallowed, taken aback by how tired he still looked and how relieved. He must have been worried to death about her for days, she realized, feeling foolish and ungrateful for weeping like an infant over what in reality was little more than a temporary inconvenience. A bizarre, frightening inconvenience, to be sure, but it wasn't as if she'd been crippled or maimed or diagnosed with some deadly ailment. Guided by an instinctive desire to make the best of a difficult situation, she drew a shaky breath and gave him an apologetic smile. "I—It sounds absurd, but I don't know what I look like, and it—" she broke off, unwilling to distress him by telling him how frightening that was. "It's a trifling thing, really, but since you're already awake, could you just describe me a little?"
    Stephen recognized her attempt to control her fear as well as reassure him—which struck him as remarkably and touchingly brave. "Describe you…" he said, stalling for time. He didn't know the color of her hair, and he was afraid of how she might react if she saw herself in a mirror, so he tried to pass the entire issue off as a joke. "At the moment, your eyes are puffy and red," he said with a smile as he flicked a quick glance at her eyes to gather additional information, "but they're… very large and… gray," he concluded with some surprise.
    In fact, she had startling eyes, Stephen realized—light silvery gray at the center with a thin outline of black at the edges and set off with that luxurious fringe of long sable lashes.
    "Gray?" Sheridan said, disappointed. "I don't think I like that."
    "Right now, when they're wet, they look like liquid silver."
    "Perhaps they aren't so very bad. What about the rest of me?"
    "Well, your face is pale and streaked with tears, but it's a rather nice face, despite that."
    She looked torn between horror, tears, and laughter. To his relief and surprise, she decided to smile. "What color is my hair?"
    "At the moment," he prevaricated quickly, "your hair is concealed by a large white… er… turban. Wearing a turban to bed has become all the rage, as you know." The night of the accident, the light had been poor and her hair had been covered, first with a hood and then with her blood. Still, her lashes were brown, so it stood to reason her hair would be. "Your hair is brown," he said decisively. "Dark brown."
    "It took you rather a long time to decide."
    She was watching him closely, puzzled but not