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He said something I couldn’t understand, and it took me a second to realize he was speaking Irish.
And as much as I wanted it to be extremely unlikely that Ronan had someone else in his life, the way he was talking to the woman on the other end of the phone was . . . well, it wasn’t the way he talked to me, that was for sure. His tone was sweet. And kind.
I watched him for another second as he turned sideways, his profile so handsome and sharp it sliced right through me. And then, exhausted and full from the bread and the tea, I stood and went to the bedroom. I dropped my towel and climbed damp and shivering into the bed. Jealousy curdled in my stomach.
When I woke up, it was dark outside the small window and the door to the main room was open, the fire visible. There was a quiet roar that took me a second to identify as the shower running in the bathroom. I only figured that out when it suddenly turned off. A few seconds later, Ronan stepped out into the bedroom from a cloud of soap-smelling steam.
“Ronan?” I whispered.
“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he whispered back, like other people were sleeping nearby when it was really just us and a lonely priest for miles.
“You didn’t. What time is it?” Time was slippery right now.
“Nine. This is our second night here. You all right?’
He stepped forward and the shadows and light slipped over his bare chest. His stomach. His naked arms and shoulders. He had a blue towel with white flowers all over it wrapped around his waist, and water dripped from the tips of his hair onto his skin, dripping from the scar along his jawline onto his chest snaking paths over muscle and scars across his chest and stomach.
I’d never seen him naked, despite what we’d done together, which made him, in this moment, somehow more naked.
And so very beautiful. Every curve of muscle and ridge of bone was something I wanted to take in. To stare at and admire. There was a scar over his chest, a bright star fire. Another slice along his ribcage, catching just the edge of his abdomen. He looked both incredibly hard and infinitely soft. A blade and a feather. He was every contradiction. All I wanted in this world was to figure him out.
And touch him. I really, really wanted to fucking touch him.
“Poppy?”
“I’m fine.”
“Your shoulder?” He kept getting closer to the bed, and I wanted to tell him to stop. To just give me a second. “You slept through your last dose. Let me get the meds.”
“You’re watching me sleep?”
He turned, and his back was a wide slope, curling in at his spine. The towel slipped as he walked, revealing the two dents at the top of his ass. I moaned, closing my eyes.
Naked in the bed, my skin felt alive, my blood humming just under the surface.
“Here,” he said, bringing in a glass and shaking out the pills from the bottles on the bedside table. I waited for him to set the pills down on the counter, but he held them out to me, and I was forced to take them from his hand. His touch an electrocution. I bit my tongue against a gasp.
I put the pills on my tongue and drank the water he handed me, and he stood there watching me like a half-naked doctor. Beneath the thin towel around his waist, I could see the imprint of his dick, and the intimacy of it all was going to kill me.
“Where are you sleeping?” I asked. “Is there another bedroom?”
He shook his head. “I’m out there.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I don’t sleep much, Poppy,” he said. “It’s fine.”
I wanted to ask a million questions, but I kept them all behind my teeth. “Your friend? Is she able to get the box?”
“If it’s there, she’ll get it. She has a connection at the police station too. So, if they have it, she might be able to get it from them.”
Oh, what a thing it must be to have Ronan’s faith so securely like that.
“It never occurred to me that while we were . . .” Oh God, what was the right word? Not sleeping together? There was no right word for what had been between us. It certainly wasn’t a relationship. It was barely a fling. But it was still somehow completely more consuming than all of that. “You know . . . you might have someone else . . . in your life. And I think . . . I think I deserve to know that. To know what I was a part of.”
“You’re asking if putting my mouth on your cunt was a betrayal of another woman?”
