Lago stared at his leg, moving it in total disbelief.
Sheba rounded on Idan, her anger clear and bright. ‘It was a compound fracture, a serious one,’ she said. ‘You might have relieved him of his pain all along. Why wait?’
Idan met her gaze, clenching his jaw and squeezing his hands to stop from reaching to stroke the stray curl of hair on her brow.
Because I wanted a reason to stay near you, his heart longed to admit.
‘Are you some kind of sociopath who likes watching people suffer?’
He grit his teeth as the words hit home.
He’d fokked up.
His face turned to stone, his expression closing off.
Without a leg to stand on to defend himself, he shifted to his farmhand and tapped the young man’s forehead to put him into instant sleep.
With a twist of his lips, he picked Lago up in his arms and stalked out of the small ward.
‘Idan, wait!’ Sheba called. ‘I didn’t mean that. I only want to understand. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said -.’
He kept moving, disappearing into the dark, her apology fading behind him.
While her admonition stung, had he also been wrong to let Lago heal under the clinic’s care, to give himself the excuse to get close to her? Had he been that selfish?
Nada, he argued with himself.
The young man’s leg had required close monitoring for blood flow.
All he’d done this evening was rush the final healing, with Lago’s veins and arteries now unconstrained due to the medical team’s intervention.
Despite the logic, his heart hammered with savage emotion all the way to his farm and even as he settled Lago into his bed in the barn.
He spent the rest of the night walking through the mountains, trying to make sense of why he was so drawn to her.
Why her? Why now?
Still, over the next few nights, he found he could not abandon her.
He returned each evening unseen, prowling the perimeter of the compound, eyes on her silhouette bent over charts and patients.
Listening to the husky register of her voice as it soothed and instructed through thin walls.
He battled how her presence tugged at him, how his desire for her surfaced without invitation or permission.
He’d long sworn himself finished with women,fokkin’ done with yearning. Especially after Artya outed his secret lineage to the ruling Council, severed their bond, and helped cast him from the heavens.
He’d survived on this merciless planet by shaping a life into its bedrock of stone, surrounded by livestock and silence, with no freakin’ softness or yearning for comfort.
Now Sheba threatened that hard-won equilibrium with every breath.
Hell on Devansi.
One night, while braced against the cliff face, his focus locked on Sheba as she pressed in her tent for night shift.
Suddenly, his senses picked up a signal.
One that scraped across his awareness, a glacial pressure at the base of his skull that yanked his focus taut.
