Page 15 of His Wedding Day Revenge

‘Don’t be stupid. You are not fine.’

He looked at her through his fingers, which were already red. Luckily she wasn’t squeamish. She was guessing it had been a long time since anyone had called him stupid.

‘Sit down,’ she coaxed, relieved when he managed to plonk himself down on the sagging sofa. She took hold of the hand he had clamped to his forehead. His healthy golden glow had an unhealthy pallid tinge and there were beads of sweat along his upper lip. ‘Please don’t go all macho and ridiculous... Let me see...’

She thought he was going to push her away, but he allowed her to thread her fingers into his thick dark hair, gently separating the strands to access the source of the trickle of blood that was dripping down his face.

‘Here... No, that’s the old scar...’ she realised, exposing a long white ridge of scar tissue she had traced with her fingertips in the past. She had imagined him earning it doing something action-man and dangerous on the ski slopes.

And didn’t that say everything there was to say about their relationship? She had never asked and he had never volunteered the information.

‘Here it is...quite deep. You might need stitches.’

‘I won’t need stitches.’

She glanced at his face. His colour was a lot better. ‘If you say so...but unless you want to look like some gory advert for a horror film, you’ll let me help. It’s self-interest,’ she added. ‘I don’t want to be known as the woman who attacked a billionaire.’

His dark eyes swivelled her way. ‘Just the woman who left him standing at the altar.’

Jane froze.

She had half anticipated that the label would follow her for the rest of her life, but it hadn’t. Miraculously there had been no photos on social media, maybe because phones had been banned at the wedding, something she had thought a bit over the top at the time.

Her eyes slid from his and the challenge in them—this was not the time or the place for explanations and she doubted there ever would be a right time. If he knew her reasons, he’d be relieved, which she could cope with, but his pity... No, she really couldn’t take that.

‘I will get something to...’ She made a vague gesture and got to her feet.

When she returned carrying a bowl of water and the contents of her first-aid box, Draco was still sitting on her sofa, looking more normal apart from the blood.

‘Send me any bills for the furniture.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘There is no blood on the furniture.’ Plenty on his shirt and a few blobs on the polished wooden floor. ‘Lucky I’m not squeamish,’ she observed prosaically as she laid the bowl on the restored carpenter’s chest that served as a coffee table. ‘This might hurt,’ she added, trying to sound chattily indifferent when she really wasn’t while dipping a cotton swab into the water where antiseptic swirled.

Objectivity was really hard to fake when she was this close to his hard, lean male body, when a thousand memories, tactile and visual, were flitting through her head, and her stomach was performing somersaults as a hunger she only allowed to surface in her dreams dug in, painfully real.

‘It’s not actually as deep as I thought,’ she admitted, her frowning regard on the clean wound where the copious flow of blood had reduced to a steady seep. ‘You might not need stitches,’ she conceded, taking a deep breath. If nothing else, the act of asking would prove she had moved on. ‘But this other scar, that must have been...’

‘A skull fracture, which, as I’m sure you’re thinking, explains a lot.’

Jane wasn’t laughing. He could feel the empathy coming off her in waves.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘HOWDIDTHATHAPPEN?’ This time she didn’t need a deep breath; the question came naturally.

‘I fell while I was...’ He had told the story so many times. Including to the medical staff when he had arrived in the emergency room, but somehow the words wouldn’t come now. ‘My father punched me. I fell and hit my head on a...’

He stopped. It was the expression on her face that brought home to him what he was doing... Which was what, Draco?

He was not a sharer.

He did not require sympathy or, worse still, pity, so why the hell had he just told Jane a fact that he had never told anyone?

‘It was a long time ago and I was an extremely irritating kid.’

Jane sucked in a breath through flared nostrils. She knew that Draco’s father was dead, that his only close relative was a half-brother, a lovely skinny beanpole of a boy who she had met briefly the day before the wedding, but in that moment she hated that father with a teeth-clenching passion.

Her small hands clenched into fists of outrage until the words bubbling up inside her could not be contained and they escaped in a rush.

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