Chapter 555
[ 539 words ]
Chapter 555:
He didn’t buy it. His gaze dropped to her mouth, then lifted back to her eyes. For a moment, the old instinct flashed across his face, the urge to take her chin and force the truth from her by sheer proximity. But the brace trapped one arm, and the other hand could not close without pain. The limitation seemed to make his fury colder.
“Don’t lie to me, Caroline,” he bit out, his voice a low, dangerous growl. “If I hadn’t come home tonight, were you ever going to tell me? Were you just going to pretend it never happened?”
The injustice of it, the sheer, suffocating totality of his control, sparked a flicker of her own anger. She pushed herself higher against the pillows, refusing to let the weakness in her body decide the strength of her voice.
“And what good would it have done?” she retorted, her voice gaining strength. “Telling you would have accomplished nothing except you sending a team to lock down the entire hospital and interrogate my doctors. It was my problem. I handled it.”
Her words hit their mark. A muscle in his jaw clenched. He turned away from the bed and walked to the window, every step stiff with pain he refused to acknowledge. He stood with his back to her, the brace cutting a brutal line across his torso, his ruined left hand held carefully away from the glass. For a long moment, he just stared into the dark reflection of the room.
He took a deep, shuddering breath, visibly wrestling for control.
“The last time you ‘handled’ something alone, you were thrown down a flight of stairs by a professional killer,” he said, his voice tight, strained. “The last time this family convinced itself a woman was safe because she was inside walls and surrounded by staff, my mother died slowly in this house while everyone explained it away as fate. My surveillance, my extreme measures… they are not a game. They are to prevent that from happening to you.”
He turned his head, and in the harsh lamplight, she saw the dark circles under his eyes, the web of red veins from exhaustion. He was running on fumes, pushing himself to the absolute limit, and all of it, she realized with a jolt, was for her.
The anger in her chest dissolved, replaced by a wave of something soft and aching.
𝗗о𝘸𝗻𝗹о𝖺𝗱 P𝘋𝘍ѕ 𝖿𝘳𝘦𝗲 𝘰𝗻 𝗴а𝗅𝘯о𝘃e𝘭𝘴.𝘤𝗼m
She sat up, the sheet pooling around her waist. She reached for him, then stopped, remembering the brace, the hand, the pain he kept trying to hide. Instead, she lowered her palm to the mattress between them, a small, open invitation he could choose to accept or refuse.
“You’re going to kill yourself,” she whispered, her voice thick with a concern that surprised them both. “You can’t keep this up.”
His eyes dropped to her hand. For a second, something raw moved across his face. Then he leaned down, not taking her fingers, only pressing his mouth briefly to her knuckles because that was all his broken body would allow.
When he straightened, the cold fury was gone, replaced by a dark, dangerous heat.
“Are you worried I don’t have the stamina to keep you satisfied, Mrs. Romero?” he murmured, his voice a low, gravelly tease.
.
.
.
If you find any errors (non-standard content, ads redirect, broken links, etc..), Please let us know so we can fix it as soon as possible.