Page 48 of Stolen By the Billionaire
“Yeah, it’s Lake Michigan,” Blaze said.
He sat himself back down at the dining table and fumbled with the ointment tube, finally shoving the cap between his molars and twisting.
“The view from up here is amazing,” Sarah said. “The pool looks like it spills over into Lake Michigan.”
“It’s an infinity pool. It’s designed to look like that,” he mumbled around the screwcap clenched between his teeth.
“It’s important to put your house on a hill or at least at elevation,” Sarah said. “My dad always said that a house on high ground will save you from flooding, and the view is important, too. It’s good for your soul to look over your fields at the end of the day. The green is restful, or in this case, the blue water. It is really blue.”
When the cap slipped out from between his jaws and bounced on the wooden tabletop, the small clatter must’ve alerted Sarah because she trotted back to him. “Let me take care of that.”
“I don’t need help,” he grumbled.
She plucked the tube from between his fingertips and shoved his elbow above his head, squeezing a narrow smear of greasy ointment down the wound. “I think it needs stitches.”
He sat still for her ministrations, though he still suspected she might strangle him with the gauze in a futile escape attempt. “I’ll be fine with butterfly closures.”
She teased the elastic strips off the packaging and deftly stretched them over the bloody stripe on the back of his arm, dragging the edges of his skin together before wrapping his whole arm in sterile gauze.
All in all, Blaze had had worse care from military doctors in field hospitals. “Nice job.”
Sarah backed up, blinking, and then looked away from him. “It’s nothing.”
He poked his arm, feeling the security of the bandage on his flesh. “It’s not nothing. You did a good job.”
Even though it killed him to accept help from anyone. He could do it.
Sarah started bouncing her fists together, one on top of the other like a doo-wop dance, then switching them. “Well, taking care of your wound is probably the first symptom of Stockholm Syndrome, so that’s a milestone in our relationship.”
He shook his head. “You won’t be here long enough to get Stockholm Syndrome.”
“That can be taken several ways,” she muttered.
Blaze dropped his arm and rolled his sleeve down over the gauze. “How?”
“You know, if you kill me before I even have time enough to develop Stockholm Syndrome?”
Blaze dropped his chin and stared directly at her. “I am not going to kill you. I am not going to hurt you in any way. You might as well stop worrying about it because you’re just going to cause yourself anxiety and harm. Worrying is a waste of energy because those things will never happen. Relax and enjoy the view.”
“Yeah, that’s what all the serial killers say.” Sarah turned her back to him and looked over the lake. Sunlight from behind the house capped each ripple with diamonds. “It is a great view.”
Blaze told her, “Your brother liked it. He told me I should buy the house for the lake view.”
“Logan was here?”
Her voice sounded wistful like maybe she missed Logan instead of being part of the family who’d shoved him out when he was barely a teenager.
Blaze, Logan, and their two other friends—the only four scholarship kids in their grade at the Le Rosey boarding school in Switzerland—were all throwaway kids. Talking about how they belonged nowhere and to no one usually required copious amounts of booze, but they stuck together.
He asked, “How old were you when Logan left Iowa?”
“Seven, I think,” she said, turning away from him to look out over the water again. “I don’t really remember.”
“You don’t remember how old you were when your only sibling was thrown out of your house when he was thirteen?”
She shrugged. “Look, I was a little kid at the time. I’m pretty sure I was in first grade. I was supposed to be asleep and heard an argument going on downstairs, and then a door banged, and then he was gone in the morning and my parents wouldn’t tell me why.”
“Your brother walked out of the house in the middle of the night in Nowhere, Iowa when he was thirteen years old, and no one even went after him?”