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Torrie lifted her arm, assessing the stitches. “They look even.”
“They will suffice. The blood was running clean again so hopefully there is no infection. But tell me if your skin gets red and puffy. I’ll need to drain it before it becomes an issue.” He motioned to the strips of linen on the desk. “I don’t want to wrap it until the scab starts to form, though—the better to watch it.”
At eye level, she looked at him, her crystalline gold green eyes boring into him. Scouring his soul. “Where did you learn to do this?”
“In the prison I should still be rotting in.” He rocked back on his heels and stood, looking down at her. “That done, why were you following me? Wishing me back to Newgate is very different than following me onto the waterfront. Creeping along the docks to watch me is an extreme that no sane lady resorts to.”
She laughed, raw and pointed. “So now I’m not sane?”
He shrugged. “You aren’t exactly rational to have walked onto the docks by yourself and expected no harm would come to you.” He met her gaze full on, taking the weight of her condemnation. “So why do it?”
Her mouth tight, her face twisted for a moment as though she was holding back the force of a thousand horses, but then her full lips cracked, her voice hissing. “Because you need to pay.”
{ Chapter 4 }
“I need to pay?” The impossibly hard set of his jawline tightened even further in front of her eyes.
He’d looked brutal earlier when she had attacked him. Now he looked deadly.
Damn her mouth.
She knew how to hold her tongue. She knew well her precarious position on this ship. She knew she was an idiot for going to the docks—for being possessed by this ridiculous obsession she had over this man. An obsession she had no control over and she didn’t need this bastard reminding her of her foolishness.
She knew all of it, but with this damn man her mouth couldn’t stay properly closed.
He closed his eyes for long seconds, wrestling back the demons of destruction that threatened explosion. When his grey eyes—the color of fresh cooled steel—opened to her, the darkness had been leashed. Demons he kept at bay—at least for the moment.
“My years in prison didn’t make me pay? Not to your satisfaction?”
For as much as she knew she needed to keep her tongue still, she couldn’t hold back, not now. Not now after all of the years knowing this man was alive, while her parents and her brother and her cousin were dead. Dust. Not now when she was sitting in front of the bastard, an arm’s length away, and he had the gall to be nice—to bloody well sew up her wound with care and quickness.
No. He couldn’t offer a few quick stitches and a look of concern in exchange for ruining her life and expect her forgiveness.
“My satisfaction?” She scoffed a hard chuckle. “No—years—days—none of them will ever be enough. My satisfaction has you in one place only—rotting in that Newgate cell, the rats feasting on your flesh. Death is too good for you—for what you did to my family.”
He leaned over her, the demons in his grey eyes sparking alive again. “I’ll say it once more, then never again, Torrie. You are wrong. I never set flames to anything. I had nothing to do with the deaths of your mother and father and brother and cousin.”
“I’ll never believe you.”
“That is your prerogative. And that is also your idiocy—for what did you think to do to me in port? You thought to mete out justice on your own?” His voice lifted. “What did you think you were going to do to me on the docks? Yell at me? Shove me into the drink? Slip a blade between my ribs? The only word for what you did yesterday was insanity.”
She leaned slightly away from the ferocity of his words. Ferocity directed at her fool actions. “Why do you even care what I thought to do?”
His arm flew up along his side. “Because your idiocy almost got you killed in the most brutal way.”
“And that is also my prerogative.”
He leaned further over her. “Your death is not your choice. And you’re more of an idiotic chit than I thought if you truly believe that.”
Fury made him whip around and grab the door, crashing it open. One step out and he stopped and turned halfway into the room, his eyes searching the floor. Spying his boots, he picked up his left one, yanking it onto his foot and then grabbed the right one she had dropped to the floor by the bed.
She sprang to her feet, her hand flying up between him and the boot. “Stop—I retched in your boot.”
He froze, his livid look going to her. “You what?”
She glanced to the boot and her cheeks lifted high in mortification, squinting her eyes. “I retched—threw up in your boot.”
He looked inside, the edges of his eyes crinkling in disgust. “You couldn’t grab your own damn boot?”
