I laughed. He couldn’t have been more right. “Yeah, it never has been very fitting. Why did you scream? And who showers with the door open?”
Reluctantly, I tore my gaze away from his chiseled chest and looked up to see his face contorting with embarrassment.
“I dinna expect ye to walk into me bedchamber, and I dinna scream. I doona scream, lass.”
I rolled my eyes—typical man. “That was a scream if I’ve ever heard one.”
“No,” he released me, but reached up and thumbed my nose gently with his thumb and the corner of his forefinger. The gesture was playful, and I smiled as he moved back toward the bathroom. “Will ye help me with these beastly…,” he hesitated, “ye call them knobs, aye?”
I nodded, my brows pulled in. He baffled me. How could a grown man, seemingly containing all his mental faculties, know so little?
I needn’t say anything for him to see how odd I thought the question. “I told ye, lass. I dinna grow up amongst such things. I nearly melted me skin off trying to run the water.”
“Alright.” I stepped into the cramped bathroom with him, reaching down past him to fiddle with the shower knobs. “Just exactly where did you grow up? Did you wear a butt-flap and swing from the trees while being raised by monkeys?” He certainly had the physique to be a type of Tarzan.
Eoghanan shook his head, testing the water temperature with his fingers. “No, I doona think I’ve ever seen a monkey. Thank ye, the water feels much better.”
He tugged at the corner of his towel, and I knew it was time to take my leave. That, or just jump right in with him. Appealing as the idea was, I thought it not the most ladylike of ideas.
“Good. I’ll leave you to it then.” I stopped walking just as he started to close the bathroom door, my own grumbling stomach reminding me of my manners. “Have you eaten anything in a while? I thought I’d go round up something for myself. I’ll bring you up something, if you’d like.”
I could just see his face in the doorway, and I couldn’t help but think how likely it was that his towel had dropped already. “Aye, I’d love that, lass.”
Smiling, he shut the door to me. Taking a breath to regain some sense of composure, I went down to the kitchen.
*
I spent the entire length of our salted cracker lunch apologizing at regular intervals for our lack of food choices. “You’re going to be starving by dinner. I truly am sorry. It’s as if she cooks her meals with magic. Seriously, I don’t understand it. She’s always cooking, but she has nothing in her cupboards. It’s…” I truly had no word for it, “astonishing.”
“Grace,” he reached out and squeezed my hand, holding it long enough to quicken my pulse. “If ye apologize once more, I willna eat another bite. ’Tis no yer job, nor Morna’s, to see me fed.” Winking, he popped another cracker into his mouth.
I watched him eat, observing him closely. He lifted every cracker with his left hand, leaving his right arm hanging at his side. He did such a good job of compensating with his left arm that I’d not noticed how little he used his right. Still, something about the way he gripped things seemed a little unnatural, and I ventured a guess that he was actually right-handed. “You write with your right hand, don’t you?”
The left corner of his mouth lifted and he shifted to face me. “Aye, and thankfully I still can do so, as long as I doona move me elbow too much. When the sword came down, it cut me deepest right along me shoulder muscle,” he paused, lifting his left hand as he traced one of his fingers along the red line, showing me its path. “Then, it hit me bone and turned, traveling underneath and along me ribs. ’Tis made me right shoulder difficult to move, but Morna says it will heal eventually.”
My eyes bugged nearly out of my head. Whatever I’d imagined as the cause of such an injury, I’d not considered a blade—a piece of machinery perhaps, but not a weapon. “A sword?”
“Aye, a mighty large one.” He took a long look at my face, observing my look of shock. “Doona worry, lass. He’s dead now—the man who did it.”
He said it so dismissively that I couldn’t help but swallow a laugh. He seemed to believe that I wondered more about whether the man who’d assaulted him was dead or alive, than why in hell someone had come at him with a sword in the first place.
Just as I opened my mouth to ask, he spoke again, changing the conversation entirely.
“I’m sorry if I frightened ye. Ye thought yerself alone, aye?”
“Yes, I did, but there’s no need to apologize.”
He nodded in acknowledgement of what I said and blew a long strand of unruly hair out of his face with his lower lip. He did it often, and I found myself wondering if months of being unable to lift his right shoulder had left him less groomed than he’d like.