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“She’s better off here,” Marcus said firmly. “We can look after her as well as anyone. We’ll take turns.”
Dr. Madhur grumbled under his breath like an old man. “You’ll need to wake her every hour to make sure she’s still alert, and keep the wound iced. Call me if she has any nausea, if her pupils are of a different size, call me if anything seems wrong.”
“Ian’s a trained EMT,” Marcus said. “I’ll call him if there’s trouble. She’ll be fine. She’s very dear to us all—we won’t let anything happen to her.”
Bella was very dear to them all, not me. For one horrified moment, I wondered whether I’d said that aloud, but no one even glanced at me, so I assumed I’d just thought it.
“See that she stays quiet and comfortable. No alcohol, small meals, and make sure she’s alert. That’s the best I can offer.”
“She’ll be fine,” Marcus said with his usual good-humored charm, ushering the doctor from the room, leaving me alone.
I sat up, very carefully, and set the ice pack on the table. I was a mess—my clothes were sticking to my skin, and while he’d cleaned the wound, he hadn’t done anything with my neck and shoulder. The silk outfit was ruined, not that I cared, and I wanted nothing more than one of the loose cotton shifts I’d bought. They were probably still in the smashed Alfa, but I was damned if I was going to lie around in the heat like this. No one had even opened the casement windows to let the evening breeze in, and I was hot and miserable.
Reaching for the pearl buttons, I began to undo them, one by one, and I’d just finished when the door opened again, without warning, and of course it just had to be Ian.
I quickly yanked the blouse back around me. “You could knock,” I said in a cranky voice.
“And you could wait for help,” he replied, shutting the door behind him and moving into the room. He looked completely unruffled after our harrowing afternoon, and I wanted to kick him. For some reason, I always wanted to kick Ian the Wretch.
“Go away,” I grumbled, glaring at him.
“No.” Fortunately he went straight to the shuttered windows and opened them, and the resulting breeze blew over my overheated body like a blessing. “Lie back down.”
“Go away,” I said again.
“Lie back down or I’ll make you.” He disappeared into my bathroom and I could hear the water running. I lay back on the bed, not because he told me to but because my head ached.
A moment later he was back with a pile of towels. “Move over,” he said. “I need to clean you up.”
“Absolutely not! I can take care of myself,” I protested.
“Not right now, you can’t, and there’s no female around to preserve your modesty. Valerie has gone for a hike, and Mary Alice says she faints at the sight of blood, which I find hard to believe. Besides, your modesty doesn’t exist and never has. I’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve stripped down in front of me to swim nude, not to mention the many views I’ve had of your ridiculous tattoo.”
Ice sliced through my veins. “My tattoo?” Bella had never mentioned that she’d acquired a tattoo.
He sat down beside me, so close his hip touched mine, and I quickly scuttled out of the way. “The bird in the bush. The hummingbird in your pubic hair, though come to think of it, last time you stripped down, you’d shaved everything. Sort of ruined the effect.”
I just stared at him with glazed eyes. How could Bella have forgotten to tell me? Why had she insisted on buying me string bikinis that I would never have worn in the first place? What if I’d been braver than she thought?
Coming here had been far more adventurous than I would have thought myself capable, and Ian was right. Bella had always been an exhibitionist, and off the top of my head I could think of no reason why she might have changed.
“Maybe I just don’t want you ogling me,” I said stiffly.
“You want everyone to ogle you, Bella-Beast. Especially me.” Before I could ask him what he meant, he’d reached for the ruined blouse and slowly pulled it away from my skin. It stuck for a moment, then came loose, and I let out a little gasp.
“Did I hurt you?” Oddly enough, he sounded as though he actually cared one way or the other.
“No. Look, can’t you just let me...?”
He pushed the blouse off my shoulder, and my head hurt too much to fight him. I let him divest me of the blouse and then I lay back against the pillows, clad only in my lavender lace bra. He wasn’t getting my pants off me, but I could still be glad I hadn’t worn the matching thong—butt floss was not my idea of comfort.
The warm, wet towel felt like heaven against my skin, and I let out a sigh of pure pleasure, closing my eyes in appreciation. In the long run, Ian was going to do what he wanted, and it was a waste of time to fight him. I simply stayed still and let him wash the blood from my body with the lavender-scented soap that had always reminded me of Mariposa.
I lay back against the pillows again once he’d done, only to feel his hand beneath my bra strap. I slapped it. “We can leave the bra on.”
“There’s blood on it.”
“I’ll survive.”
