I’ve lost half my vocabulary in the past sixty seconds.
“Riley. Your pain. How is it?”
“Right, sorry. Um…painful.”
He gives me a stern look, but I’m too distracted to find it scary.
“Why do you have blood on you?”
“Work. How’s your pain?”
“A little better. Or at least not worse.”
He seems satisfied by that, nodding and holding out another spoonful of soup. We’re both quiet as I finish the bowl, staring alternately at the blankets, the wall, the ceiling, and the terrifying moose, anywhere but at him and his devastating beauty.
Then he sets the spoon and bowl aside and announces he’s going to take a shower.
He stands and heads to the bathroom, leaving me flattened on the bed, drained of energy by the sight of his body and the single word he used to explain the blood.
Work.
He was working today.
Doing assassin stuff.
Killing people.
My brain refuses to get a handle on it. I simply can’t reconcile the idea of Mal the gentle, attentive caretaker who cleans my wounds and feeds me soup with Mal the guy who blows people away for a living. Who came to Bermuda to kill Declan.
Who may or may not have wanted to kill me.
I’m thousands of miles from home, injured, in horrible pain, in a foreign country I was brought to while unconscious, where I might die of complications from the gunshot my bodyguard gave me or the bootleg surgery I underwent to repair it.
This is just too fucking much.
I start to cry again, hating myself with every tear that falls.
Sloane wouldn’t cry in this situation. She’d already have made an escape vehicle from the moose head and burned the cabin down.
When Mal returns to the bedroom, I’m lying with my arms flung over my face, dragging in big, shuddering gulps of air.
He pulls my arms away from my face and stares down into my watering eyes. Then he says something that sounds gentle and soothing, but I can’t understand a word of it because it’s in Russian.
“You know I don’t know what that means.”
“Yes. Which is why I didn’t say it in English.”
“That’s not nice.”
“You wouldn’t think that if you knew what I said.”
Biting my lip, I stare up at him. His wet hair is slicked back off his face. The white terrycloth towel wrapped around his waist is the only thing he’s wearing. He smells like clean skin and healthy male in his prime, and holy Ghost of Christmas Past, I can’t look at him for one second longer.
I close my eyes, turn my head, and whisper, “Why did you bring me here?”
He gently folds my arms over my chest and sits beside me. I can feel him looking at me, but refuse to open my eyes. After a moment, he asks his own question, ignoring mine.
“Why did you take a bullet for me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. Tell me the truth.”
His voice is low and urgent. I imagine those beautiful green eyes gazing down at me with their usual penetrating intensity and wish with all my heart that I didn’t currently look like I’ve been sleeping under a bridge.
I take a deep breath, let it out, and tell him the ridiculous truth in a voice so small, he probably can’t even hear it.
“Because I didn’t want you to die.”
His silence is long and intense. He exhales. Then he lifts my hand to his lips and kisses it, brushing his mouth softly across my knuckles, turning my hand over and pressing his lips against my open palm.
He rises from the bed without another word.
I hear him moving around the room, opening and closing drawers. His footsteps recede. When they return, I open my eyes to find him fully dressed, boots and all. He lowers himself into the big brown leather chair in the corner.
He folds his hands over his stomach, tilts his head back, and closes his eyes.
“What are you doing?”
“Going to sleep. So should you.”
“You’re gonna sleep in that chair?”
“What did I just tell you?”
“How can you sleep sitting upright? Isn’t there a sofa in the other room that you can lie down on?”
He lifts his head and looks at me. “Stop worrying about me.”
“But—”
“Stop.”
When he can tell I’m about to start pestering him again, he says gruffly, “Yes, there’s a sofa. No, I’m not going to sleep on it. I need to be in this room. I need to hear if you cry out. I have to know if you’re in pain or you need anything. Don’t ask me why, because I won’t tell you. Now go to fucking sleep.”