Her body went oddly light at the interest hooked in his tone. Had she revealed too much? “What?” she asked, hiding her unease beneath a smile. “Would you not want a sister like me, then?”
His eyes darkened. “Woman, I’d be many things to you, but brother is not one of them.”
Blazes.
What to do with a statement such as that?
*
Drake rested proppedagainst the wall, every throb in his body a reminder that he had come perilously close to losing. He despised the weakness of that. Despised that Violet had witnessed this failing. Worse still, that she had tended him through it while being at her mercy.
It was damnably shameful.
He was not accustomed to being tended.
His gaze slid to where she reclined at the edge of the cot, close enough that he could absorb the subtle glow of her closeness without touching her at all. That, too, was a deuced problem. She occupied his space as though she had every right to be there. The truth was—and it was perhaps the most perilous part of this, even more so than his wound—he didn’t mind. He drank her in like the cognac in his grip. Her blue eyes and that wayward strand of red hair. He wanted to seize the strand again, possess the scent, and feel the raw silk of it across his mouth. The pounding at his back was suddenly usurped, settling in front as a low, burning, indecently hard throb.
Ah, Christ, you’re a fool.
She was hiding something. He knew that with the same certainty he knew the placement of every valuable in this room,every exit, every contingency he’d laid for nights exactly like this. The spitfire had no intention of harming him, her actions had made that plain, but neither was she who she claimed to be. No mere woman acted the way she did.
And she had a brother.
The words sat in him like a second wound. He’d turned it over a dozen times since she’d let it slip. A brother.
He almost hoped he was wrong.
The suspicion, no, theknowledge, however, still lodged within him with the same dull insistence as his wound itself. Impossible to ignore. Violet had played it off, but the blunder had been there all the same. It could be nothing. It could be everything. She also hadn’t run. She’d saved him. Twice. That, more than anything else, counted most. It should have been enough to quench any suspicion he might still have.
Should.
Instead, his suspicion of her only sprouted another leg. Conclusively, she had no intention of harming him, but that didn’t mean that what she hid might not.
He also couldn’t overlook that she had stayed when slipping away would have been more convenient. Stayed when his blood had soaked the floor. Stayed and stitched him up. What the devil was he to make of this woman?
His gaze dropped to her lips.
Using the term brother with him in the same breath? He wanted to laugh. Should he just show her how much of that was impossible?
“Who is the enemy you’ve made? He seems rather determined.”
His gaze lifted back to hers at the question. “A fop in London I offended.”
“Oh? And just how did you offend him?”
He held her gaze, unblinking. Any curious person would ask, but his gut did not ease. “Does it matter?”
“It matters if I am being dragged into the mess with the fop you offended.”
“One could say you’ve dragged yourself into my matter when you stepped to take the blade for me.” His voice darkened on the last.
“That was never my intention, and you know it.”
“Yes, your body moved before your brain could catch up.”
“Exactly.”
Drake’s mouth lifted into a small smile. “So you’re telling me that on some irrefutable level, you are fond of me.”
