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Don’t cry. Don’t apologize. Don’t ask for forgiveness.
As a motto, it had served me just fine. I wasn’t going to change it now.
I unlocked the bedroom door and knocked before pushing it open. Pretending at manners. The room, without the heat from the fire, was cold.
You didn’t think of that, did you, you edjit? my father taunted in my head.
“Poppy?” I called. The window up near the ceiling was too small for her to climb through.
“In the bathroom.”
“You decent?” I asked, standing in front of the shut bathroom door.
“Does it matter?” Ah, my princess still had some claws.
“Well, if you’re taking a shit—”
“Jesus Christ, Ronan. I’m in the bath.”
I opened the door, expecting to see her hiding beneath the water with only her head visible. But whatever motto Poppy had been living with to keep herself safe before she’d been shot, kidnapped, and taken to Ireland was gone.
My princess was turning into a queen.
She sat in a bath so hot steam rose off the water, curling around her hair that hung down her back and over her collarbones in damp blond curls. She was leaning against the porcelain, a towel between her skin and the cold tub. The water lapped at the underside of her breasts. Pink from the heat. Nipples hard in the cooler air. Her skin was flushed and creamy and I, like I always did around her, felt my dick go hard from one heartbeat to the next.
Poppy was thinner than she should be, but her tits were perfection. The things I wanted to do to them . . .
“This bother you, Ronan?” she asked. With her good arm, she lifted the washcloth and squeezed water over her neck and chest. Water trickled over her nipples.
Jesus Christ. This fucking girl. All I needed right now was Poppy being brave. Bold. I needed meek Poppy. Scared and submissive Poppy. Not this . . . goddess.
“No,” I lied. “You aren’t supposed to be getting the stitches wet.”
“I’m not.”
She’d taken off the tape and the bandage. Tight, black surgical stitches started in the front of her armpit and went all the way around to the back. The skin was puffy and pink but not red. “The doctor said you needed to keep it dry.”
“I am.”
“Have you taken the medication—?”
“You locked me in the goddamned room, Ronan. You can stop pretending you care.”
“Did you take the meds?” I asked again because I cared. I cared too fucking much.
“Yes, Daddy.”
Oh, that fucking girl. She wanted to play Daddy games? I could—
I jerked away from that thought. “I thought you’d be hungry.”
“Starving,” she said, clearly attempting an innuendo. I smiled, but she couldn’t see it as I put the tray down on the sink. “You want to come in?” she asked, bending her legs so her knees poked out of the water. “You look like you could use a bath.”
She wasn’t wrong, but I shook my head at her.
“Suit yourself,” she said with a shrug that made her tits wobble. Light from the open door behind me licked her skin the way I wanted to.
“Have you seen the cat?” she asked.
“What cat?”
“The one that lives under the bed. There’s another one out on the stone steps.”
Tommy and those fucking feral cats.
“I haven’t seen any cats.”
Poppy watched me from the bath in a way that was suddenly disconcerting. Something had changed. Some small thing, and she was different.
Poppy had brown eyes, and when I’d met her in that side yard that night she’d been sold off to the senator, she’d looked like one of the deer that showed up on this hilltop all the time. Wide-eyed and wild. And young. Too young.
Now, her eyes glowed like the whiskey I could use right now, and they were narrowed like she would take me out if she could. Fuck, if I didn’t like that.
She’d been a blonde the night I met her, and every time I saw her after that at a gala or a function, careful not to be seen by her, she had still been a blonde. But that day in her kitchen, when Caroline took me to have a word with the senator, the brilliant natural red of her hair had been coming in at the roots.
She’d dyed it blond again, but the red was coming back.
Like it was just inevitable.
“I need some answers,” I said.
“Funny. Me too.”
I rubbed a hand over my face, hiding my smile. Fuck. I was exhausted. But this Poppy . . . naked and angry . . . this Poppy was going to a problem. In more ways than one. We’d been in the wind for almost two days already and I didn’t know how many more we had.
“I called your sister before we left the States,” I told her, giving her the information most likely to win her to my side. “I used your phone and then destroyed both our phones.”
