AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He only let her take five swipes at it before grabbing her wrist. “Ye don’t have to do this.”
“I do.”
He shook his head. “No. I can tend to my own wounds. I always have.”
“But this.” Her head tilted toward his temple. “This was my fault. I will clean the mess of it.”
His fingers dropped from her wrist and she resumed gently pressing the cloth against the dried blood and dirt, soaking it free from his skin.
Another minute passed before his stormy eyes lifted, pinning her. “You’ll not say more?”
“Do I need to?”
His eyes narrowed at her, his mouth set in a hard line. “Tell me. Truth—you said it yourself, it is the only thing to live by. Who did this?”
Her chest lifted in a sigh as she kept her attention on blotting the wound—better than to have to meet his stare head-on. “It’s the real reason I agreed to help you, to come with you. There’s a man at the Den. His visits have become increasingly frequent—and I have always passed him off onto one of the other women when the time has come for the bedroom.” She flecked off a tiny, jagged rock in a stubborn clump of blood. “But it has taken more and more cajoling to make that happen. More brandy, more talking. Yet he has become more and more insistent that he have me in his bed.”
“He hurt you?”
She paused for only a second in her motions. Damn that she paused at all.
She forced a smile onto her lips. “Nothing I couldn’t handle. But it was why I was at the Willows. I had thought to escape London for a fortnight to let him cool.”
“Because he was soinsistentthat you felt the need to flee London?”
“I didn’t think he would go this far. That he would send men after me.” Her shoulders lifted. “He was obsessed, yes. But I’ve had men before like him, men that fixate on me and cannot let go. This one…this one is different, though. He doesn’t know bounds. The core of him is…evil. I feel it every time I am near him.”
“Then why is he allowed into the Den?”
“Lord Vontmour has yet to do anything grave. It doesn’t help that the man is privileged to his bones, knows it, and is an ass to all around him because of it. And the one person with the power to kick him out of the Den for good was otherwise engaged this past month.”
“Mr. Hoppler?”
She nodded. “Hoppler had been taking care of his personal affairs and then trying to find Pen after she disappeared. His mind has only been on her, as it should have been. I thought I could handle Lord Vontmour.”
Most of the blood cleared from his temple, Juliet bent over farther to look closely at the slice of the wound separating his flesh. “I was wrong, and you paid the price. I apologize. I never should have gotten you involved. I never imagined he would have us followed. Never imagined he would have you nearly killed in order to abduct me.”
“You mean ye should have just gone back to the Den and let him do whatever he damn well pleased with you?” His head turned and he looked at her directly. “Tell me you don’t think that was an option.”
Standing up straight, she sighed with her lips pursed. “I do not care for it when the truth of the matter needs to be pointed out to me.”
He chuckled. “I am happy to serve the purpose.”
“I imagine you are.”
With the gash on his temple cleaned, Juliet looked down to the wound on his upper arm that had sliced through both his tailcoat and his shirt. She couldn’t discern how bad it was for the black of his coat, but along the rip of fabric there was the telltale matting of blood soaked into the wool.
She reached out with her left hand, her fingers tracing along the tear on his upper arm. “I’ll need to look at this one as well. You need to take your coat and shirt off.”
Turning from him, she went to the bowl of water and dunked the cloth to rinse the blood from it. Dunk, swish, squeeze, over and over. She kept her gaze on the water tingeing pink in front of her, ignoring the rustling of clothes leaving Evan’s body behind her.
Damn, but she was beginning to like the man.
Against all her ingrained instincts, she liked him. She could count on one hand the men she liked. Hoppler, Jasper, Talen Blackstone, and Egbert—though Egbert she liked for the goofiness that would escape him when he wasn’t busy doing the dirty work of the business they were in.
She couldn’t afford to like this Scot.
And as much as she wanted to escape north with Evan for a spell, he’d been hurt because of her. Unacceptable.
