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“Who did this to you?” I asked as I unlaced his boots. “Tell me.”
“Grimaldi.”
“And?”
“No one else.”
“I don’t believe you. You could take Grimaldi one-handed.”
“He got the jump on me.”
“Ronan…”
“Doesn’t matter, Shiloh.” His voice was stronger now. Clearer. “I shouldn’t have come here. I thought…”
“What?”
He didn’t answer and I let it go. For now.
“We’ll talk about it later. We need to get you cleaned up and you need to sleep.”
I stood and carefully lifted his T-shirt—the first time I’d seen him with it off despite everything we’d done over the last few weeks. Being naked was my last holdout against intimacy, though I’d wanted desperately to see him and touch him. Put my mouth on his skin and the magnificent body I felt under my hands.
But not like this. Not like this…
Ronan was covered in bruises—dark shadows in the dim light—except for one angry splash of reddish purple on the left side of his ribs.
“Oh God…” I swallowed hard and pushed the panic down and worse, the terrible agony that squeezed my heart to see him in so much pain.
I dipped the end of the towel in the bowl of warm water and held Ronan’s face gently in my hand. I wiped the blood off his mouth and chin, being careful not to bump his nose. Then I cleaned around his eye, carefully. He took my wrist.
“You don’t have to do this. I never wanted this. To bring this ugliness to you…”
“And I told you. You could never be ugly to me.”
I held his face in both hands, the towel cradling his cheek, and kissed him softly on the lips. His good eye fell shut, relief sighing out of him, and my heart broke all over again.
I gently swabbed the cut around his swollen eye with antiseptic, then laid him down on my pillow. He let out a half sigh, half groan—more relief to be lying down than pain, I hoped.
I sat beside him, my back against the headboard, and held the icepack on his eye while my fingertips softly grazed his scalp. My gaze trailed over his shirtless body, rigid with abs and the perfect broad plains of his chest. The compass pendant glinted against the tattoo on his right pec—a quote that was upside down from where I sat and unreadable in the dimness. Beneath it, there was another tattoo I hadn’t known about. A sketch of a man in medieval clothes with huge wings, barbed and webbed like a bat, his face turned up in despair. He looked to be falling or flying away from something that chased him.
But it was the bruises that colored Ronan’s skin that absorbed my attention.
“I think your ribs might be broken.”
“Probably.”
I winced at his matter-of-fact tone. As if cracked ribs and setting his own smashed nose were ordinary, everyday occurrences. “I don’t know what to do
. You should go to a hospital.”
“I can breathe okay,” he said. “They’re just fractured. Nothing to do.”
“This has happened before?”
He didn’t answer.
“It’s late,” I said. “Do you need anything else? Water? Aspirin?”
