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She hoped.
She knew it was suspect, the edge of her shift drifting from high along her hipbone to sink inward at the crux of her, the fabric bunched beneath her pelvic bone. But rules of modesty did not exist in this situation.
She flipped her head, her face away from him. She didn’t know what she’d find in his look when he turned around and saw her, and she wasn’t quite ready to find out. Her gaze fixed on the wine atop the table. She should have gotten herself several glasses deep before they started this. She was far too sober. “You can turn around now.”
His feet shuffled.
A beat of silence.
“Hell, Victoria.” The rough cut of his voice into the room twisted something deep in her stomach.
She could only guess what her thigh looked like. She had felt the wetness of blood seeping again and again under her thigh throughout the day as her leg rubbed hard against the saddle, but she’d forced the thought of it out of her mind, just like she had the pain.
But now her leg was raw to the air, raw to Rafe’s eyes, and her stomach churned.
Two steps across the floorboards and the mattress shifted, his weight going down onto the edge of the bed next to her calf.
Silently, his hand settled on the back of her thigh just above her knee. A shock, the coolness of his fingers sent prickles to her skin.
In silence, his fingers slid up her inner thigh, his other hand grasping the outer part of her thigh, both of his thumbs pulling her skin this way and that. Looking for the abusive glass slivers. When her skin tugged in certain directions, pain shot through her leg, but she hardly noticed it for how focused she was on the sensation of his fingers sliding upward on the unmarred parts of her skin.
Farther up. Farther.
Frozen. No breath. She had to hold completely still to not belie the sensations coursing through her body at his touch.
She gulped.
Lawks.Was that audible?
His hands there. On her thigh. Herinnerthigh. Nearly brushing the crux of her.
Little balls of spinning embers curled into her toes, shooting up her legs to land in her crotch, her folds thumping with every heartbeat and an ache like she’d never known taking over and twisting with the pain in her leg.
She knew Rafe was just looking at a piece of meat he needed to fix. Prodding it. Planning out how to attack the slivers of glass.
But the devil.It felt good.
Too good.
Her rebellious nerve endings had taken over all rational function in her body and she could feel her left leg lifting slightly, pressing into his touch.
His hands suddenly abandoned her skin and her body went into revolt, angry at the loss.
The tweezers and knife clinked along the edge of the washing bowl. “How did you ride today with this? The shards had to have been grinding into your skin with every step of the horse.”
There. Words.
Words were good. Words got her mind thinking again.
“Victoria? Did I hurt you?”
“N-no.” The word croaked out and she cleared her throat. “I ignored them. I have to get to Seahorn. Eva is more important than the pain in my leg.”
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
It took her three long breaths of silence before she could answer, her voice petering to a whisper. “This. What needed to happen. There wasn’t time for it and I wasn’t…ready. This is far too intimate.” Her only saving grace in the moment was that she wasn’t facing him and he couldn’t see the heat in her cheeks ready to burst into flames.
“You don’t trust me?”
