Before she had fully thought, she was moving toward him. Her hand closed around his arm. “You’re hurt.”
Chapter eleven
Rosemary and vinegar thickened the infirmary air. Beneath both lingered the sharper smell of blood, metallic and unmistakable.
Aingeal paused just inside the door while her eyes adjusted to the low light of two candles burning beside the pallet. A basin of steaming water waited nearby, clean strips of linen folded in careful stacks.
Donal sat on the edge of the pallet with his tunic unlaced and one sleeve dragged down from his shoulder. Blood had dried along his forearm and cuff. More soaked the linen he held loosely against the cut high beneath his arm.
For once, he looked less like the composed man who moved through halls and council chambers, and more like what lay beneath all that control. A warrior, bone-tired and bleeding.
He lifted his eyes. “My lady.”
Aingeal shut the door behind her with her heel. “If you call me that while I am holding a basin, I may let you keep the wound.”
A faint light stirred in his expression. “Then I will try very hard to deserve better.”
The answer touched something low and strange inside her. She ignored it. “Seamus said it was deep.”
“Seamus enjoys wounds. They give him purpose.”
“And is it deep?”
“Enough.”
“That is not an answer.”
“No,” he said quietly. “It is not.”
She set the basin down and turned to face him fully.
Candlelight slid over the broad line of his shoulder. Old scars crossed him in pale, faded marks: one near the collarbone, another along the ribs, a third half-hidden where cloth still clung. She had known he would bear scars. Men like him always did. But knowing was one thing. Standing this close and seeing them laid bare in heat and hush was another.
The sight made something inside her loosen against her will. She reached for the blood-stiff cloth. “Hold still.”
His gaze stayed on her face as she peeled the linen away.
The wound was not mortal. Relief moved through her before she had any right to feel it.
The cut ran longer than deep, a blade turned at the last instant. Fresh blood welled where the old bandage had stuck. Aingeal dipped a clean rag into hot water, wrung it out, and pressed it gently to his skin.
He did not flinch. His hand only tightened on the pallet.
“Liar,” she murmured.
He looked at her.
“You said it was enough. It hurts worse than enough.”
A shadow of humor crossed his face. “I said it was enough. I did not say it pained me only enough.”
She should not have smiled. She did anyway.
The room was too small for smiles, too close and too quiet. Each time she rinsed blood from the cut and pressed clean linen to it, she became more aware of him. The warmth of hisskin. The controlled rise and fall of his breath. The fact that he watched her not with vanity or impatience, but with a steady attention that made her pulse unreliable. “You should have let the physician tend this,” she said, because silence had become too full.
“He was with the villagers from the western holding.”
“So you thought I would do?”
