“What made you come back?” He asked.
She brought the basin over to the nightstand with a bar of soap and clean linen. That act alone sent his pulse at a gallop, and he nearly missed her response. “I never left.”
“What?” That couldn’t be.
“Is your hearing failing you, my lord?”
“No, you’re distracting me with thoughts of the last time you bathed me,” he responded honestly as he tried to hold the anger roiling through his body. “You’ve been here the entire month after I specifically asked you to leave?”
She rinsed the linen out in the basin, wrapped it around the bar of soap, and began stroking the bar as if there was something entirely different in her hands. He narrowed his eyes and studied her expression. Everything he saw told him she hadno inkling of how her actions might affect a man, and her actions were definitely having an effect on him.
Down boy.
“You didn’t tell me to leave,” she said.
“I most certainly did.” This conversation was getting harder and harder to follow. He closed his eyes and concentrated on another part of his body not betraying his desire.
“You are mistaken, my lord.”
“Mistaken?” Like bloody hell. “I specifically told Ross you were not to return.”
“No message of the sort was conveyed to me.”
“Of course I did, the day—” He closed his eyes and cursed under his breath.
“Do you mean the day you proposed to Máira?” She asked.
He pursed his lips and nodded. He definitely wasn’t getting a sponge bath after that slip of the tongue.
“If I recall correctly, I told you your servants would be taking care of you from then on and that I wouldn’t save your life if Ross called you out for ruining my sister.”
“I didn’t ruin your sister.”
“I know.”
Her response was the distraction he needed to keep his mind off images of her delicate fingers wrapping tightly around his cock. He searched her face. “You do?”
“Yes. She is now married to the father of her baby. The Earl of Dorset, I believe that is his title.”
“He’s not an earl.”
“But he is,” she insisted.
“No, that was just the cover he used to seduce your sister.”
“I’m not sure I’m going to like this story.”
He didn’t like the story. Máira’s condition was because of his need to be rescued. It was hard to regret his life being saved, but he did regret what her sister experienced. “No one has told you?”
“Told me what?”
He decided to give her the bare minimum. “Elias Drake is a pirate.”
“A pirate! My sister is married to a pirate?”
“Calm down. He’s actually a privateer.”
She dropped the linen into the bowl as if she were done with the entire affair. “Very little difference between the two.”
