She froze for a second, color flooding her cheeks. Then she chuckled. “Is my nervousness that obvious?”
“And she blushes, too.”Beautifully, I might add.“Are you sure you’re a doctor?”
“Of course. It doesn’t mean I’m completely impervious to the…nakedness or closeness of the human body…especially one so lean yet muscular as a lion like yours.” The last part was a covert mumble but I could hear it.
“Oh.”
“Oh?”
“I thought you were nervous because of the wounds and damage covering this human body, as if you were afraid to hurt me more than I’d already been hurt. I didn’t think…” I lied in a tease.
Her blush deepened. “Well…that too.” She shook her head and put the cold cloth on my chest. I hissed with a flinch. The water seared some of Domenico’s flogging wounds and the flayed skin that hadn’t had a chance to heal yet. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she apologized as if it were her fault.
“You’re not the one who hurt me. You’re only trying to help.”
Her lips twitched. “The one who hurt you should pay.”
Was that why she was so willing to help without any resistance after we practically robbed and kidnapped her? She empathized with me? “How do you know I didn’t deserve it?”
“No one deserves this.” She looked at me, and I could make the color of her eyes. Green with hints of gray. A shade I was familiar with, and not just because of Lina. “No matter what you did, you didn’t deserve this.”
Our gazes locked for a while before she dropped hers with a hitch to her breath. She returned to clean my shoulder and the slope leading down to my pectoral. Then she worked the pads of my pecs gently, pausing at every scar.
She swept the washcloth down my stomach, her fingertips warmer by the second. Even her breath falling on my skin was heating up. Laughter rippled through my belly, clenching my abs tight. She couldn’t be that innocent.
Her hands stopped in their tracks. “Please don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at the coincidence that put someone like you in the path of someone like me on a day like this.”
She pressed her lips and then licked them as her fingers traced the contours of my abs and the—now scarred—tattoos around them. I sucked in a hiss at the sensation. It wasn’t pain. There were no open wounds there. It was, despite the searing aches of the torture injuries and the bullet piercing my leg, a pleasant shiver that was about to raise the dead.
That shouldn’t happen.It hadn’t happened in a while. It was good to know it was still alive. I laughed again.
She sighed, and her eyes flickered between my cuffed wrist and myhips. Now that she was done with my torso, she must have been debating whether to do the other arm or go south.
“You can do my other arm later. It’s far from my leg to infect it,” I teased again, waiting for that beautiful blush to reappear.
“You’re right,” she said to my surprise. Then she swallowed, staring at my underwear—and the semi erection they outlined. “I’m going to cut these, too.”
The innocent doctor might not be as innocent as she seemed to be.
“How about I do that part? The cleaning too? I don’t think you want to go there.”
“Your arm among so many bones in your body is broken. It’s a miracle you’re still conscious and moving. You should do nothing but lie still. For weeks.”
“We both know that’s not gonna happen.”
“Then, at least, let me do this one thing for you.”
“Why? Why do you feel that much obligated to help me, totake my pain away?”
Her gaze narrowed at me, and another sigh burst out of her lips. “Because…I’m a doctor. I took an oath and everything.”
Bullshit.
She grabbed the scissor quickly and cut through the dirty fabric. “It’s nothing really. Just let me wash you. It’s no big—” She gasped when the fabric dropped off my cock.
I waited for the virgin shock to pass—because I truly believed she’d never seen a cock before. “You were saying?”
