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Me, on the other hand, I was tired, hungry, and sick of feeling my back throb in time to my heartbeat. Altogether, they were making me a bit cranky. “Since you’re the one who stabbed me,you’llclean up your mess,” I snapped.
“Thenyouprobablyshouldn’t have kidnapped me. It’s not a good way to make friends.”
She said it so prim and proper, I could envision her in Buckingham Palace, giving the royal family a lecture about proper friend-making etiquette.
I turned away, scrubbing my hands through my hair, then winced when the movement hurt the damned stab wound.
Prim and proper or not, I’d had enough.
“If you prefer, I can handcuff you to the bed,” I said, nodding toward the hallway beyond the living room, “so I can drive all the way back to the city to get stitched up.” I shrugged. “It’s a long drive, a long time with no food, no water… no bathroom. But it’s up to you.” I turned back to face her, waiting for an answer.
“Well?” I said, cocking an eyebrow when she didn’t respond.
“Well, what?”
“Make your choice,signorina.”
Uncertainty flashed in her eyes and her brow furrowed, like she really had no idea what I was talking about.
Christ, it had been a long fucking night. “Do you want to stitch it up or…” I turned toward the window.
“Fine,” she said, cutting me off. She looked more flustered than I’d seen her thus far.
But at least that had been easier than I’d expected. I’d been half-prepared to wrestle her onto the bed to cuff her there, and that sounded like one hell of a bad idea. Actually, it sounded like one hell of a good idea… which was precisely why it was a bad idea.
“Bene,” I said, thrusting everything else out of my head for the time being.
I unbuttoned my shirt and tugged it off. The dried blood clung to my skin and the shirt, and I had to yank harder to peel it away. Fucking wonderful.
I could feel her eyes on me the whole time, roving over me appreciatively. She could hate me with her mind all she wanted; her body had other plans. Those star-flecked eyes of hers were definitely heating up—I’d decided that’s what they looked like; rings of twilight sky filled with pale stars.
I tossed my shirt on the coffee table and sat down on the sofa cushion next to her, my back facing her.
“Don’t bother trying to run, Heidi; there’s nothing around here for a hundred miles. You’d run into animals or collapse from exhaustion long before you made it back to civilization,” I warned her. It was a genuine warning. Coyotes and wolves and even bears weren’t unheard of in the area.
She didn’t answer; she was already opening the medical kit and sifting through the contents inside.
I turned to look at her. “Can you stitch?” It came as an afterthought.
Most of the people in my world had good reason to know their way around a medical kit. But this woman wasn’t from my world, and suddenly, I had visions of her stabbing me in the back with a suture needle just for the hell of it.
She shrugged. “I suppose we’ll find out, won’t we?”
She tugged on a pair of gloves, grabbed a package of gauze and the bottle of alcohol, then shoved me back around none too gently. Which turned out to be nothing in comparison to the fiery hell that followed when she doused the gauze with the alcohol and rubbed it across the open wound. I swear she kept it up far long than was necessary.
I clenched my jaw and stayed silent. I had a feeling she’d take great delight in hearing me groan.The little sadist.
When she’d finished with the fire in a bottle, she placed it back in the kit. There was a syringe of anesthetic in there, but she ignored it, readying the suture needle without it. She’d just touched the tip of the needle to my flesh when her fingers hesitated.
She put down the needle and reached for the anesthetic.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “Enjoy a little payback,signorina.” It was the least I could offer her.
But once again, she ignored me, picking it up like I hadn’t said a word.
I turned to put a hand over top of hers, and she dropped the syringe, yanking her hand away, eyes wide, arms drawn in close to her body when I looked back at her.
Scared is what I’d wanted, right?Mission accomplished, asshole.
