Page 70 of Salt Kiss
It comes clear as a bell. The mysterious trip to Ireland, thePhiltre D’Amour. The person with the Irish mother.
Isolde.
“If you are stuck on a boat and that wound gets infected, you will deserve fucking septicemia,” Dr. Sutcliff says with the weight of someone laying a curse on a victim. “Stay. Here. And. Rest.”
He turns to me and adds, “Make him drink that entire glass of water,” and then leaves without so much as a goodbye.
“He’s very surly for how much I pay him,” Mark observes as the door to his apartment closes.
I step forward and set the towel and the washcloth on the table, hand him the glass of water, and then I take a step backward, away from him. Because he’s shirtless, and the slanting afternoon sun is finding the white-gold streaks in his hair, and the dried blood streaking his chest somehow makes him look better, not worse, and I don’t trust myself, I just don’t. Not around him.
Mark lifts his eyebrows at me. “Got somewhere to be?”
Anywhere. Anywhere that isn’t the place you’ll be bringing a bride.
“No, sir.”
He doesn’t drink the water, not yet. He’s still regarding me. “Clean me, then.”
“You’re supposed to drink your water. Sir.”
His mouth tilts a little. “I forgot that I have a Dom now too. Very well.” He sets the glass to his lips and, without breaking eye contact with me, drinks.
I heroically manage not to watch his throat move as he swallows.
“Now,” he says after he finishes and sets down the glass. He takes hold of the damp washcloth and holds it out to me. “Clean me.”
I take the washcloth, our fingertips brushing as I do, and hot sparks prickle along my knuckles and palm. They sweep up my arm and settle in my chest, and everything is warm and everything is cold and everything hurts and also I feel nothing at all.
I need to tell him that I know. I need to ask him why he lied.
I need to—I need to end things between us.
Things.
Just fucking. Just kink. It shouldn’t feel like I’m preparing to dig out my wet, slippery lungs with my bare hands and throw them in the trash.
I wish it were only the habit of obedience that has me stepping between his legs and pressing the washcloth to his skin, and I wish it didn’t thrill me to see the goose bumps pebbling his chest as I work.
He doesn’t speak as I clean him, but his eyes are his possessive eyes, his Morois House eyes, watching me with dark, avid fascination. I flush.
I hate that everything feels right when he’s watching me like this. I hate that I crave what comes next: his hand on my neck or the sound of a zipper. The slick search of his fingers inside me.
Tell him. Tell him.
I open my mouth, meaning to start with something eloquent, something that puts the last thirty minutes of shock and misery into an excoriating declaration of exactly how fucked up he is, but nothing at all like that comes out.
“Ireland,” I say, my voice toneless. My hand keeps moving across his chest, scrubbing carefully at the dried blood. “You were going to Ireland.”
Mark’s gaze shifts, and there’s a different kind of watchfulness to his stare now. “Yes.”
“Was it something to do with your bride? Isolde?”
His hand comes up and captures my wrist. To hold me still, I think, so his eyes can search mine.
After a long minute, he asks softly, “You didn’t know?”
“Why would I have known?” I ask bitterly.
