“Yes. It was my honor to do it. You’ve been very brave.” She shakes her head. “No, don’t disagree, darling. You have. You were a small child who protected your even smaller cousins. Don’t underestimate the courage it took to do that. Where was your aunt during your captivity?”
“I dinna ken,” she says, “they separated us when they took us to the warehouse. I could hear her crying sometimes, though. I tried to call to her and the men came in and…” Sorcha breaks off, shuddering. “Anyway, we dinna see her until Cormac rescued us.”
“You keep crying out the same thing in your nightmares,” I say carefully.
Her face loses color. “What? What do I say?”
“You say…” My throat closes up and I’m shocked at the surge of grief that swamps me. “You say, ‘Don’t hurt them, hurt me.’ What did they do, sweet wife?”
“I dinna… I dinna want to talk about that.”
“Will you tell me?” I know what she’s going to say, but having her choose to tell me can be healing. Her shoulders slump.
“They kept control of us by threatening to hurt one and making the other two watch,” she says, shuddering. I pull the quilt up to her chin. “They never wore masks, they wanted us to know what they looked like, I knew that meant they would probably kill us. There was one, he was a real bastard. The prime bastard. He had a knife he liked to use. I always took the punishments. My cuzzies, they were little, just bairns, you know. I dinna let the men touch them. Not once.”
Closing my eyes, I fight back the fury. If her brother hadn’t killed those vicious fucks, I would have tracked them down and tortured them to death myself.
“What would he do, love?” I’m proud that my voice is still calm.
Sorcha pulls her thick hair over one shoulder, baring her back.
Taking the wordless invitation, I lean in close, my hand just hovering over but never touching the silver lines making a map of pain over her smooth skin.
“I’ve… um, I’ve always regretted that I didn’t try to talk my mother out of the revisions. The plastic surgeon made so many visits. I think the procedures to hide the scarring hurt worsethan when that man gave them to me.” Her voice was detached, even a little dreamy.
The lamp on the bedside table lights up the delicate marks crisscrossing her back, down to the base of her spine. My hand hovered over them, feeling the warmth from her skin.
“May I touch you?”
“I’ve read about…” She takes a deep breath and starts over, “You’re not one of those men who gets turned on by them?”
I give a soft chuckle, sitting up and turning to face her. “No. But these are marks of courage. And they’re beautiful.”
Sorcha pulls away. “Dinna say that. It’s so condescending and my therapist used to say it and-”
My fingers, rough and calloused from years of battle, settle gently on her collarbone, the softest of touches. I take her hand, directing it to a cluster of scar tissue just under my ribs.
“A bullet. Hollow point, so it disintegrated into a dozen pieces in my abdomen. We were in the middle of a firefight with a Colombian cartel, so Callum had to remove them with a pair of pliers and a switchblade.” I can feel her cool fingers trace the scarring, the touch feather-light. I lift my left arm. “This one…” I gently move her hand to my back, just over my kidneys, “this was a knife - a KA-BAR. He was trying to get it into my kidney, one twist is instant death.”
Her lovely face creased in sadness. “I’m so sorry.”
I cover her hand, resting it on my heart. “Do they disgust you?”
Now, I’d offended her. “Of course not!” Her wide eyes look up at me. “How could you think that?”
God, the tenderness I feel for her…
“Then you must accept that I find you to be utterly beautiful. Powerful. Brave. You were then, and even more so now.” My breath is heavier in my chest, slower, as I carefully draw the back of my fingers up her arms and over her shoulders. Her lids drop to half-mast, a shaky breath drawn as I slide one hand into her thick hair, and the other carefully cradling her cheek, my thumb stroking her cheekbone.
“May I kiss you, my bride?”
She opens her eyes again, staring into mine. Open, painfully stripped of her little shields and barriers. “Yes, please.”
“Thank god,” I mutter, bending down to put my mouth against hers.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
In which Alastair is not even a wee bit subtle.
