“What happened isn’t my fault,” she sniffled. “I’m just sayin’.”
He raised his head and frowned at her. The raw, bruised look had not quite left his eyes. She had never seen him look like that before. She put her forefinger to the deep line between his brows and tried to smooth it away. He pressed his lips to her palm. The exchange did nothing to sway his attention from other things. He said, “How did you disappear, and why do you feel and smell like Carling’s Power?”
“Actually,” she muttered, “it’s not so much what she did to me, as it is what she did to you. She has a Djinn who is indebted to her. He owes her three favors, or he did—he’s now down to two. She had him transport me from the bedroom up to her suite. She said it was to teach you a lesson.”
He growled, a deep rumble that vibrated through her frame. “What did that crazy bitch do to you?”
“Shh, remember everything’s all right now,” she murmured. She cupped his face in both hands and searched his eyes. They were obsidian without any telltale flickering of white. She stroked his lean cheeks. He was such a proud man, and he was so handsome when he wasn’t looking like he might tear down skyscrapers or dismantle nations with his bare hands. “She healed me, and we talked for a bit. That’s all.”
His eyes narrowed. “Healed you,” he said.
She opened her eyes wide. “Completely, Tiago. It’s the most amazing thing. See for yourself.” She pulled back so that she could lift the top of her lounge suit and show him the silvery scar. “It hurt like a son of a bitch too. I could feel it knitting together inside.”
Tiago touched the small scar. The brush of his blunt calloused fingers was featherlight. “It doesn’t hurt anymore?”
“Not a bit. I feel like I did before the attack.” She fingered the tiny stitches. They looked like baby spiders against her pale skin. Ew, actually.
He frowned. “Those need to come out.”
She was opening her mouth to tell him she could take them out later when he picked her up and deposited her in an armchair as effortlessly as one might move a house cat. He opened his duffle bag, took out a toiletry kit and pulled out a small set of clippers. Then he knelt in front of her. She squirmed.
He smiled at her, a real smile and not his usual sardonic grimace, the kind that crinkled the edges of his eyes and revealed the handsome set of his features. “You sit still, faerie,” he ordered as he pushed up her top. She kept her knees pressed together and angled to the right as she tried to do as he said.
He bent close to make sure of the snip. His gigantic hands that were so gifted in killing were remarkably gentle as they brushed over her skin. She stared at his broad shoulders and dark bent head, and dug her fingers into the arms of the chair, her stomach clenched against a stir of arousal.
His smile deepened. He could sense it, she knew. He could scent the changes in her pheromones. Blood heated her cheeks. She felt exposed and trapped in the armchair with his large powerful body pressed against her legs, but she didn’t want to push him away. He snipped the stitch and told her, “Here comes the tug.”
She nodded and he pulled the stitch out. He soothed the area, quite unnecessarily she thought, by massaging it with the ball of his thumb. Then he bent close again to remove the second stitch.
She waited for him to move, to straighten away from her, but he did nothing. Instead he tilted his head and stared at her scar. Something unfamiliar moved over his normally aggressive expression. It was a quiet reflectiveness that opened a window to that landscape hidden inside him and revealed—pain.
Her forehead crinkled. He was angry, irritable, rude, protective and sarcastic, comforting in danger and calm under fire and unrepentantly, aggressively antisocial. He was simply an unconquerable spirit. It hurt her to think of him in pain or distressed. She put her hand over his as it spanned her rib cage.
What he did then shocked her to her toes, as he bent close and pressed his lips to the scar. A quaking started deep inside. It spread out and collapsed her like a house of cards as he straightened and sat back on his heels. She threw her arms around his neck and fell against him, shaking and clinging to him as if he were the only stable thing in the world.
And she was afraid. She was very much afraid that it might be true.
“What is it?” he asked. That rough rich voice of his was throttled down to a quiet murmur. He hugged her tight and rocked her. “I thought things were better now.”
She had to clear her throat before she could speak. “You listen to me,” she said. She pulled back, grabbed him by the shoulders and tried to shake him. It was like trying to shake a Mack truck: quite patently impossible. “Please don’t argue with me, threaten, posture or deflect. Just listen to me, Tiago.”