She was apparently going to pretend that very thing, primly giving him her back and saying, “How dare you come here like that?”
He was too angry, mostly at himself for not taking her concerns more seriously, to wonder where such absurdity was coming from. She’d just been assaulted while under his protection. She’d also proven she was capable of fending off such an assault.
“You would rather I paused to dress instead of coming immediately to find if you needed my help when I heard your cry?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He took her hand again to lead her out of there. Boris tried to thrust a blanket at him, but Christoph waved it aside. His nakedness was the least of his concerns.
He took Alana to his own room for privacy. He kept his own anger under control, or tried to.
As soon as he closed the door behind them, he said, “Tell me what happened.”
“One of your men tried to kill me. I yelled as soon as I knocked him off me.”
She seemed to have calmed down, but she hadn’t turned around to face him yet. He needed to see her expression, her eyes, to gauge what she was really feeling.
“Kill you how? And look at me.”
“Not until you’re dressed.”
He sighed, but marched over to where he’d tossed his clothes earlier and thrust his legs into his pants.
“A shirt, too,” she said.
His eyes shot up toward her, but she still wasn’t looking in his direction. Had she peeked at him, or was she just being thorough?
He slapped his chest. “This is nothing.”
She glanced over her shoulder at him, but immediately looked away again to say, “I disagree. Any other man’s bare chest might be nothing, but yours is far too distracting.”
He stared hard at her back. A compliment in the middle of mayhem? Or was she just trying to soften his mood because she could sense the anger he was trying to keep from her. He put his shirt back on. He even tucked it into his pants.
“Now turn around and tell me exactly what happened, from the beginning.”
She turned about slowly. His eyes were immediately drawn again to the blood splatters across the front of the robe, so stark, red on white. If one of his men did this . . .
“Wait,” he said.
He moved to his wardrobe to get her another robe. She quickly shrugged off the bloody robe and he helped her into the clean one, lifting her long black hair out from under it. The blood hadn’t soaked through to the nightshirt she was wearing. He came around in front of her and tied the robe closed for her.
Before he stepped back, he put a hand to her cheek. “Better? I swear nothing like this will happen again—they’ll have to get past me.”
“Thank you.”
“Can you tell me what happened now?” he asked gently.
She nodded. “I was sleeping. I woke the moment the pillow was yanked from under my head, but I was still too groggy to know I was in danger—until he threw himself on top of me, knocking the breath out of me. And then he thrust the pillow over my face, making sure I couldn’t regain my breath. I tried to find his face with my hands, but he was leaning just out of my reach. I was in such a panic by then, I don’t know how I remembered the club I’d tucked to my side before I fell asleep, but I did.”
“So that was yours?”
“Yes, I broke a leg off the table. I swung it where I thought his head might be. I was hoping to knock him out, but he must have turned, seeing it coming, because it smashed his face instead. But it did knock him enough to the side that I was able to heave him the rest of the way off me.”
Christoph was given pause. “He was on top of you? Are you sure he wasn’t trying to have his way with you?”
She scowled at that interpretation. “And kill me in the process? He was smothering me! That’s murder where I come from.”
“Or a means merely to conceal your screams. It wouldn’t be the first time a guard has taken advantage of a female prisoner.”
“You allow this?” she said incredulously.
