The Cinderella Deal - Jennifer Crusie [57]
There were so many layers to Linc, and they were all inside that great body. She definitely had to get out of his bed. And she wasn’t sleeping well. Between her concern for Gertrude and her lust for Linc, it had been a rough week. Well, at least it was all over and they could get back to normal living. She went into the dining room and found Linc sitting at the table.
“What are you doing? Are you hungry?” she asked, and he turned his pale face to her, and she saw his eyes were dulled. She felt his forehead. It was burning.
Terrific. “You have the flu. Get into bed. I’ll call Evan. He can proctor your finals.”
“I’m all right,” he said, and she said, “No, this is contagious. You stay home. Go upstairs.”
Daisy couldn’t decide whether Linc was sicker than Gertrude, or if it was just that he hated being sick so much that he seemed sicker. She brought him books and tea and soup and the radio and the TV, and he still thrashed around feverishly unless she was in the room with him. She read to him from his history books, and her voice seemed to calm him, the words keeping his mind off his aches until he got so sick, he didn’t care anymore.
His fever went up, and one night she woke up and found him standing dazed in the hallway.
“What are you doing?” she scolded him. “Back into bed.”
“I thought it was midnight.”
“It’s three-thirty, and even if it was midnight, you’re still not supposed to be wandering around.”
“I thought you’d gone,” he said, and she realized he’d thought it was Cinderella’s midnight.
“No. I won’t leave you. Get back into bed.”
She tucked him back in and he said, “Come in here with me. I’m cold,” and she slipped into bed beside him and held him next to her warmth until he was quiet again.
In the morning his fever had broken, and hers began.
Linc still felt like hell the next day, but he knew just by looking at Daisy that she was worse.
“I can get up.” She pulled weakly at his arm. “You’re still sick.”
“I’m not that sick.” Linc put his hand on her cheek. “I’m all right. Get back in bed.”
“No.” She had crawled out of bed and staggered past him out onto the landing. When she turned to go down the stairs, she put out her hand for the rail and missed, and as she fell forward, Linc caught her and picked her up, his heart pounding from the adrenaline rush he’d gotten when she’d started to topple. He carried her into her room and pulled back the covers and made her crawl into bed, and then he popped the thermometer into her mouth.
“Stay there.” He tucked in the covers tightly around her. “I’ll put water on for tea.”
He could tell Daisy wanted to argue, but she was too sick. Linc sympathized; he’d never felt as bad in his life as he had the past week. No wonder his mother had cried. He brought a tray of tea and crackers up and put it on the table. Then he checked her temperature. “One hundred and one.” He shook the thermometer down and put it in his own mouth and crawled in bed beside her.
“That’s got my germs on it,” Daisy said, and he looked at her with disdain over the thermometer. “Oh, right. We’ve got the same thing.”
A minute later he took the thermometer out and looked at it. “Just under one hundred. That’s lower than yesterday, right?”
“Right.” She closed her eyes. “You were one-oh-two yesterday.”
“Good. I’m the one getting better, so I’m the boss.”
“Ha.”
“Shut up. We’re going to be smart about this. We’re going to sleep and drink juice and tea until we float, and we are not going to go charging around like we’re healthy when we know we’re not.”
“Does we mean you too?”
“Of course it means me too. What did you think it was, the royal we?”
“I thought maybe it was one of those nurse things. I feel awful; do you feel awful?”
“Yes.” He put his arm around her. “Where does it hurt?”