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A blinding flash, like white light, shot through him. Not an external thing, but an inner slice of laser-sharp pain that he felt as an echo of hers. He knew that sort of grief—
Before he realized what he was doing, he’d moved to catch her arm and spin her around to him.
She used her momentum to bring her free hand up, sending it flying toward his face.
He caught her wrist and jerked back his head, his reflexes honed by war and a natural dominance that always kept him on guard. Still, a heavy blanket of regret suffocated him as he held her while she wordlessly struggled. He’d insulted her because he was angry, but he would never wound someone by dangling such a loss over them. An apology was needed, but holding on to her was like trying to wrestle a feral cat into a sack.
“Stop fighting me,” he ground out, surprised by her wiry strength and unflagging determination.
“Go to hell!”
He got her wrists in one hand behind her back, her knee scissored between his own tightly enough to prevent it rising into his crotch. Squeezing her enough to threaten her breathing, he loosened off as she quieted.
“Big man, overwhelming a helpless woman,” she taunted in a pant.
“You’re not that helpless,” he noted, admiring her fighting spirit despite his inherent knowledge that he shouldn’t like anything about her.
She was widowed. That was tremendously important, even though he refused to examine too closely why he was so relieved. Or why he was now determined to learn more about her. He’d been serious about not being corruptible, no matter how his body longed to be persuaded.
Her shaken breaths caused her breasts to graze his chest, increasing the arousal their struggle had already stimulated. She recognized his hardness and squirmed again, forcing him to pin her even closer to hang on to her.
“Let me go,” she said in a furious voice that provoked more than intimidated.
“In a minute.” He reached to remove her mask—
She tried to bite him. He narrowly snatched his fingers from the snap of her teeth.
“You little wildcat.” He couldn’t help but be amused by her streak of ferocity. Her bared teeth were perfect, her pinched nostrils as refined as a spoiled princess’s.
“I’m reporting this assault,” she told him.
“I have a right to see whose body I was in last night,” he told her, unconsciously revealing with the low timbre of his voice how disturbed he was by the memory.
“No, you don’t. I’m discerning about who sees any part of me. And maybe I didn’t bring my best game last night because I was bored and wanted it over with. Did you think of that?”
“I suppose I deserved that,” he murmured, but her insult still landed like a knee in the gut, making his abdominal muscles clench in offense.
Digging his fingers around the knot of her hair, he tugged lightly, deliberately overwhelming her with his strength, exposing her throat and making her aware she was at his mercy. Not because he got off on hurting women. Never. But she needed to understand that even though she was utterly vulnerable to him, he wouldn’t harm her.
“Now we’ve both said something cruel, and neither of us will do it again.”
Her outraged “Ha” warmed his lips, making him deeply conscious of the shape of her Kewpie-doll mouth with its peaks in her top lip over a fat strawberry of a bottom one. Her scent, like Saponaria, somewhere between dewy grass and sun-warmed roses, threatened to erase all thought but making love to her again.
“I only said what I did because I thought you were married. And you tricked me. I don’t like your trying to take advantage of me. To even the playing field...” He reached for the tailing ribbon that held her mask.
“Noooo.” The sharp anguish in her voice startled him. She was genuinely terrified, straining into a twist to escape his loosening of the mask.
He let go of the ribbon and her, horrified that he’d scared her so deeply, but he couldn’t help reaching to steady her when she staggered as she tried to catch the falling mask. Her shaking hands fumbled it before her, turning it around and around, trying to right it so she could put it on again. A desperate sob escaped her.
It was too late. He’d seen what she was trying to hide, and the bottom dropped out of his heart. He touched her chin, wanting a better look.
She knocked his hand away and flashed a look of fury at him. With her jaw set in livid mutiny, she stopped trying to replace her mask and stared him down with the kind of aggression that would make him fear for his life if she’d been armed.
“Happy?” she charged.
Not one little bit.
As he took in the mottled shades of pink and red, all he saw was pain. He’d been in battle. He knew what bullets and flames and chemicals could do to the human body. That’s why his world had stopped last night when he’d thought a bomb was landing on the ramparts of the club.
But these were healed injuries, as well as they’d ever get anyway. The ragged edge of the facial scar followed a crooked line like a country’s border on a map, sharply defining rescued flesh from the unharmed with a raised pink scar. It hedged a patch from over her left eye into the corner of her lid—she might have lost her sight, he acknowledged, cold dread touching his internal organs. Under her eye, it cut diagonally toward her nose before tracing down to the corner of her mouth and under her jawline, and then wound back to her hair.
The side of her neck was only a little discolored, but the way the color fanned at the base of it made him suspect the scarring went down her arm and torso, too, maybe farther.
As he brought his gaze back up to her face, he met eyes so bruised and wounded, he was struck with shame at causing her to reveal herself. He hadn’t been trying to humiliate her. This wasn’t meant as a punishment.
The hatred in her eyes took it as such anyway, stabbing him with compunction.
“I wouldn’t work for you if your country was knocked back into the Stone Age and we were overinventoried in animal fur and flint. I’m leaving. Now.”
He didn’t try to stop her, sensing he’d misjudged her on a grand scale.
She tied her mask into place without looking at him. When she pressed the button to open the doors, they didn’t cooperate, remaining closed while she swore at her watch.
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