Page 23 of Once More, My Darling Rogue
“Will it wash off?” she asked softly, with awe. “If I scrub it, will it disappear?”
He stared at the far wall, realizing that a portion of her was captured in the oval mirror hanging there. Had she ever looked so innocent, so disarming? He didn’t like her looking like that. It made her approachable, made her appealing. He did not want her appealing. He wanted her to see him across a ballroom floor and remember that she had once washed his back. He wanted her blushing when he sat across from her at a dining table. He wanted her stammering when next she sought to remind him of his nonexistent place in Society. He wanted to snap at her to get on with washing his back. Instead he heard himself explaining far too reasonably for a man experiencing such inner turmoil, “No, the ink is beneath the surface.”
“How did it get to be there?”
“Needles.”
The door clicked shut. The rustle of skirts. She sank from view and he didn’t want to envision her going to her knees. Blast it. The bathing chamber created an intimacy he’d been fool enough to misjudge. He had anticipated it affecting her, not him.
“Did it hurt?” she asked on a breath that was more whisper than substance. Her fingers lightly touched his lower nape—where the top of the dragon’s head curved—stealing his voice, his thoughts, his purpose. They felt like fire, and it was as though once again something was being scored into his flesh, only this time it was burning, branding. He didn’t know if he’d ever be able to forget the feel of her fingers against his flesh.
He fought to regain his control. “Yes.”
The solitary word was all he could manage, but manage it he did. He supposed he could relish some victory in that. Even if his voice sounded rough and foreign to his own ears.
Her fingers traced the outline of bridge, snout, mouth before trailing in a featherlike touch across red, blue, yellow, black.
“Why fire? Why does it breathe fire?”
To destroy my demons.
Not that he was about to confess that. For once he had the upper hand with her and he wasn’t about to give it up. He didn’t want to provide her with any fuel that she could use against him when her memory returned. No, this one day was about him obtaining the means to put her in her place ... eventually.
“So I can use it to frighten small children.”
She laughed. Not the haughty caustic sound with which he was so familiar, but a sweet tinkling of bells at Christmas. Oh, he’d heard the sound before when she was with Grace ... No, this was different, unguarded. He’d never heard the like coming from her. Had she never revealed her true self, even to Grace? “I don’t see you being that unkind.”
Outlining the spread wings now, she seemed to slow her movements as though in reverence. He could hardly blame her. When he was a lad, a dragon had caught and held his attention, had changed his life.
She stopped where the water lapped at his ribs. The dragon reached down to his buttocks, but he supposed reaching her hand into the water to touch it would create a familiarity with which she was not quite ready to deal. Hell, he wasn’t certain he could handle it.
“It’s beautiful, and yet why would you put art upon your back?”
He considered telling a lie, but when her memories returned, he had little doubt that she would be able to guess a good part of it.
“I was an orphan on the streets. A woman took me in. Her husband had a dragon tattooed on his back. When I first saw it, it frightened and fascinated me. I was a bit of a scamp, prone to misbehaving. He painted a dragon on my back, initiated me into the order of the dragon, and told me the woman was the queen of the dragons and I must always obey her. He used watercolors that eventually washed off, although it was some time before I realized it, as I couldn’t see my back and wasn’t prone to standing in front of mirrors. But by then, I had learned that I gained much more by behaving than misbehaving. I wanted to stay with them, because of the dragon. Because of them, I am a different man than I might have been otherwise.”
“But you said it was painful. I suspect it was agonizing. Why go through that?”
“One must always know pain in order to appreciate beauty.”
“That’s rather morbid. Are all your thoughts so dark?”
“Not all of them.”
“Does it hurt now?”
“No. However, it must be washed.” Reaching for the soap, he grabbed it and handed it back. He sensed her hesitation rather than saw it, and wished he had angled the mirror so he could view her. He heard her swallow, felt the slight tremble in her fingers while they skimmed over his palm as she took the soap from him. Now his palm knew her touch and he found himself balling his hand into a fist as though he wanted to hold on to the sensation.
He couldn’t blame her for trembling. Touching him was one thing. Washing him brought with it a more complex and deeper level of familiarity. Wrapping his hands around the lip of the tub, he leaned forward to give her easier access.
And felt the ball of soap gliding across his shoulders. Not at all what he wanted. He wanted soft. He wanted silk.
“It’s better if you use your hands,” he told her.
“How do you suppose the soap is moving if not with my hands? With my mind?”
The tartness in her voice made him smile. The dragon’s allure had obviously dissipated; unfortunately for him, hers was merely increasing. He should send her on her way, but he was enjoying this on many more levels than he’d anticipated. “You know what I mean.”
