Page 48 of The Sinner's Bargain

“Pull the car around.”

“Already done.”

I nodded and peered down at the woman slowly destroying me. “Up for a car ride, love?”

Her eyebrows lifted. “I can come with you?”

With her hand still in mine, I led her to the door. Cyrus stepped aside, eyes still carefully averted.

“I don’t think you should trust me to find you clothes,” I said evenly.

“Why not?”

The corner of my mouth quirked. “You wouldn’t be wearing much.”

Her eyes widened even as her face flamed crimson. She squeaked a tiny, “Oh!” that sent me roaring despite myself. The sound crashed through the corridor. A first in a very long time.

I took her up and kept tugging her along when she started to pause at her door. Her curious glance up at me was met with the squeeze of her fingers.

The door to my room opened with the twist of the bed brass knob. It swung in and I nudged her inside.

Her gasp was everything.

I knew it would be. I knew her fascination with windows would make my room the best room in the house.

“I can’t believe it!” She hurried to stand at the center of the massive sheets of glass dominating three of the walls to peer down at the lake rippling just beneath it. Then the vaulted, glass ceiling damp with rain overhead. “How do you ever leave this room?”

I felt myself grin as I left her to trace the smear of gray and green landscape far in the distance and ducked into my closet.

She was still there when I returned with a black blazer, a bundle of socks and a pair of boots.

“I could stay here forever,” she breathed.

I didn’t think she was talking to me, yet I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking what was stopping her.

I had definitely been without a woman too long if the first one to land on my doorstep had me in knots. It had only been two days.

Two days.

Offering to share my bed was a step I hadn’t taken with any of the others. They hadn’t even seen the inside of my room. It was my space.

My personal space.

But looking up to where she stood with her small hands flat against the glass and her eyes fixed on the horizon like it held the key to her next breath, I didn’t mind her there.

I stepped up carefully behind her. “We have to go.”

Her shoulders rose and fell in a deep sigh before she faced me.

I led her to the bed and perched her on the edge. She continued to watch the world from over my shoulder as I dampened a rag in the bathroom sink and returned to clean her feet.

“What’s out there?” she said.

I looked up only long enough to follow her gaze to where coils of fog lifted from the ground like ghosts escaping purgatory. “Swamps.”

“Is that why it’s so foggy?”

I switched her left foot for her right. “The ground is warm and the air cool around this time. Ireland’s the same. It’s full of bogs and marshes and the fog is thick when the weather changes.”

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