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Her head lifted off the pillow.
“Dom, I’m stripped to the bare under here.”
He met her look straight on. “That ye are.”
“No.” Her head twisted to the side though she kept her gaze locked on him. “Did you?”
He shrugged. “Of course I did. The fire was barely sputtering when I got ye back here. You were soaked to the bone and I had to get the freeze of the snow off of ye.”
“But—”
“But nothing. I averted my eyes.” A slight grin lifted his right cheek. “My hands didn’t slip…much.”
“Dom—”
“I tease.” He patted her ankle. “It was frightening how I managed to undress ye with the utmost propriety. Even an Almack’s patroness would have approved.”
She exhaled an exasperated groan and her head fell back down onto the pillow. Coming from any other man, she wouldn’t believe those words. But from Domnall…she believed him. Twinkle in his blue eyes and all.
He pointed to the middle of the blankets. “Are your fingers still blue?”
She pulled her right hand free of the cover of blankets and held it in front of her. Though her muscles hurt—hell, every inch of her body ached raw—the color of her fingers seemed normal. She turned the pads of her fingers to Domnall.
He leaned over her legs, his eyes squinting at them in the light of the fire. “Aye. They look much better than they did.”
She tucked her hand under the heavy wool blankets, watching him as he watched the fire and rubbed her feet.
Impossible.
She couldn’t quite grasp the twist of fate that had sent him here to the earl’s abbey and into her path. She’d given up years ago on ever seeing Domnall again.
Unless…unless he was here for her. And if that was the case, he’d better think again on what he thought to do here in Badenoch. She wasn’t the innocent girl he’d once known. Far from it. And she could never let him discover what she’d become.
She cleared her throat. “What are you doing here, Dom?”
“I could ask the same of you.”
“I live here—well, not here at the abbey—I live at the Leviton dower house to the east of this estate. I have since Lord Leviton died.”
His hands on her feet stilled. It took a long breath before he looked to her. “I’ve been away from Vinehill Castle—in Spain, procuring new bloodlines for the herds—so I hadn’t heard the information on his passing. How long has that been?”
“He died in May.”
Domnall nodded, his jaw stubbornly still, his gaze going back to the fire.
“Your turn, Dom. What are you doing here?”
His head slowly turned to her and a heavy breath lifted his massive chest. “I’m the new Earl of Kirkmere.”
{ Chapter 4 }
She was a widow.
The viscount she’d left him for, dead.
The one woman he would have once moved mountains for. Now a widow.
He’d been attempting to wash her from his blood for the past six years.
