Page 52 of Bargaining with the Devil

“Not sure I dislike the sound of that, a stór.”

Her face heated when she caught his implication. “That’s not what I meant by that.”

“’Tis a shame then. Are you sure? The night you found me after I’d come in from the rain, you were looking at me a bit like that. Made me wonder what exactly you were thinking about doing to me.”

Her cheeks were very hot now. Ridiculous given what they’d done last night. “I wasn’t thinking of making you pay for anything when I was looking at you that night.”

“I do like it when you go pink like that, a stór. Tells me just what you might be imagining.” He smiled—the one that would be mocking if there wasn’t something warm behind it. “You were thinking that night about what going to bed with me would be like. Might as well admit it, a mhuirnín.”

“Fine.” She’d admit that now. “A little. But more about touching you than taking things that far.”

“Now you’ve touched me. I hope ’twasn’t a disappointment after your imaginings.”

This was an entirely absurd conversation to be having while slogging across the bay, her arm bound up and throbbing with her heartbeat. Undoubtedly he was doing it intentionally, making ridiculous conversation to keep her mind off her discomfort long enough to keep putting one foot in front of the next.

She let him, because it was working, mostly.

Back at the cottage, Quinn helped her out of her filthy gown and out of her dirty shift so that she needn’t strain her arm. He checked her bandages and decided they were good at present. She put on a clean shift of fine wool, sleeveless but soft and warm, and sat on her bed as he undressed in the outer room. He draped his dirty clothing over one of her chairs as he’d been doing since he barged his way into her life two weeks ago. Nude now, he paused by the blanket on the floor that he’d been using as bedding, glancing her way. She shook her head and patted the bed beside her. He smiled as he came towards her.

She was done fighting it, whatever this was that sparked between them. And she was done denying it. Life was short and sometimes terribly fraught. No one knew when their last moment was coming, or very few did anyway. She’d nearly had hers this morning. Or his, had something gone awry during his scuffle with Lymington—and then followed by hers when either Lymington or the tide caught her. Life was too short to not do as she wished. And right now she wanted nothing more than to fall asleep in Quinn’s arms.

When he gathered her in close, spooning himself against her back so that her injured left arm was free to move how she needed it, his cock was hard against her arse.

“Just ignore my cock, a mhuirnín,” he murmured, “because I’ll be ignoring it. ’Tis just hard because I like being up close to you like this, not because I’m planning to use it. It might seem a bit demanding, sure, but I’m master of my cock, not the other way ’round.”

She smiled because the string of speech was just so very Quinn.

Rather quickly his breath against her ear slowed and lengthened, and his arm on her waist grew heavy. She’d expected to fall asleep quickly as well but found herself still mulling over everything.

It seemed like everything, everything, in the world had changed in the twenty-four hours since she started out for Heston.

She’d nearly died. Nothing new in some ways, but she’d never faced her mortality in quite the way she had this morning. She wasn’t sure yet how she felt about that.

Last night she’d spoken aloud about Teddy for the first time ever, to anyone, at least in the sense of unburdening herself. Certainly she had talked about Teddy with Compton whether she’d wanted to or not. But she’d shared some of that now too—Compton, and more about Cuvelier than had been necessary to share in France.

She hadn’t told Quinn everything about Compton. There were still layers that she was not ready to reveal and might never. But she’d said Compton’s name aloud. More than said it aloud—she’d told Quinn about the day Compton inked her skin after giving her a choice between dying or living a living death. It wasn’t all he’d done that day, but it was the part she’d had to literally see every time she undressed for over two years.

It wasn’t just unburdening herself that was different. She’d gone to bed with Quinn. With someone who desired her as much as she desired him, which she’d realized far too late wasn’t the case with Teddy. And she understood now too that she’d known nothing at all about what it meant to go to bed with someone for the sheer pleasure of it. The things Quinn had done to her, for her . . .

And it was purely because he wanted to, because her pleasure genuinely pleased him as well. And she hadn’t realized it could be like that. It wasn’t with Teddy, and Cuvelier was a different situation altogether.

On Heston she’d faced pain too. Not just the physical pain of having the mark sliced from her skin, but the pain of reliving memories, truly reliving them and not seeking some way to deny them when they surfaced. Probably those were things she should have told Isobel long ago. Her sister would have listened anytime, or Nathaniel would have. But neither of them had pushed her. And perversely she’d resented them for not pushing her, although she recognized it wasn’t fair to them.

She’d been carrying the belief, all this time, that if she never spoke of wretched memories, eventually they would mean nothing. And then less than nothing. But that wasn’t true. All she’d done was create a deeper wound inside, one so deep it had never had chance to heal.

Her soul felt bruised today from having spoken about Teddy and Cuvelier and Compton, but she also felt lighter than she had in years. Quinn had been challenging her recently, pushing her towards that, but she took some pride in having accepted what he offered rather than turning away from it.

She’d decided on Heston Isle to be the kind of woman who faced pain head-on without hesitation, even knowing hurt was coming. She might now be back on the mainland once more, but she truly believed that here too she could be a woman who did not shy away from difficult things.

Likely it would be easier said than done. But she was resolved to try.

Something pulled her abruptly from sleep.

Quinn’s muscles tensing beneath her, him shifting her slightly, registered before she drowsily made sense of the noise that woke her.

He reached beside the bed and came up with his pistol in his hand, leveling it towards the outer room. That jolted her fully awake just as the cottage door latch lifted.

“Lucy?” Nathaniel’s voice.