“I am not.” Catherine squeezed his hand.
“You could have been.” Alaric’s voice caught.
You would have been, and I would have been to blame.
There was a knock at the door, and the physician appeared. Alaric quickly stepped aside, allowing the man to do his work. He clasped his hands behind his back.
“You have something to keep the wound clean?” Alaric nodded to Catherine’s shoulder, wrestling the urge to pull the doctor off her with some difficulty.
“Yes. Gin will work a treat. I suggest you take a swig. I will need to stitch this.” The physician grimaced. “I am afraid it will leave a rather nasty scar.”
The man looked at Alaric, as though he was worried about what he would think. Alaric gazed back at him, utterly nonplussed. “So long as she is happy, healthy, and alive, I do not care.”
The physician colored at his words and nodded, handing Catherine a bottle of gin. Alaric moved to stand beside her without thinking and felt her take his hand in hers.
Her nails dug into him as the physician worked on her wound, but she did not utter a sound. Alaric shook his head. Blood trickled down his cheek, and he suspected it would leave a scar.
He reluctantly let go of Catherine’s hand as he paid the physician. She gave her statement to the constables.
With every word Alaric overheard, he felt cold sweat pour across his body.
She decided to go after the woman by herself with a fire poker?
When she said, “I thought I was going to die.” He swore he felt his soul leave his body.
“You are lucky h is Grace reached you in time,” one of the constables said.
He saw Catherine nod, her eyes flicking toward him. He felt like she was not so much looking at him as she was looking through him, puzzling him out like a particularly intriguing riddle. He swallowed.
Tell her the truth.
“I will contact you if we have any more questions, but I suspect justice will be rather swift. With what the woman confessed to you… Well, let us just say the sentence is not one fit for such genteel ears.” The man doffed his cap and left the room.
As the door swung shut behind him, silence settled between Catherine and Alaric. He massaged his neck, all his carefully planned words tumbling from his mind under the icy cool of her gaze.
“Why are you here, Alaric?” Catherine asked, but she did not close the distance between them.
Words were lodged in his throat, each one struggling for space. Finally, he shrugged, his eyes meeting hers.
She shook her head. “I am afraid I am going to need more than that.”
He let out a long breath.
“You.”
CHAPTER 29
“You.” Alaric’s word echoed around them, and Catherine felt her breath catch in her throat.
As the physician tended to her wounds, some of the initial shock from Alaric’s dramatic return into her life began to fade. The relief she felt upon realizing she was alive and that he had saved her again was replaced by something else.
She rubbed a hand absently across her arm, remembering the way he had swept her into his own arms and carried her to the room. He made her feel weightless, as though it was the most natural thing in the world to lift her like that.
Part of her wanted to run to him, to fall into his arms and cry with happiness. Another part desperately wanted to hit him, shout at him, and tell him to leave, that she never wanted to see him again.
“What do you mean?” Catherine asked, her internal war raging unseen. “You told me you wanted freedom. That you did not want me in your life.”
“I thought that by being with you I was putting you in danger, that I was doing the right thing by pushing you away.” Alaric took a step toward her, his hand twitching as he curled it to his chest. “I told myself that it was for the best. That I was not the right man for you, that we would both live better lives apart than we would together.”
