Page 24 of Dangerous Exile

His body instantly tightened at her words and his arm swung out, shoving her to the side as he stomped past her toward the door. His voice dropped, cold and vicious. “Aye, you’re right. I don’t want that. Don’t need that. Because you don’t know it.”

“But maybe it wants you,” she screamed, dropping the shard of the teacup and picking up the cane chair she’d been sitting in.

With a growl, her right arm swung back and she hurled it at him as hard as her small frame allowed. Except the chair went flying into the bookcase next to the fireplace because she released it too late, sending her into an out-of-control spin. A spin directly toward the protruding white stone mantel of the fireplace.

Her forehead didn’t stand a chance and her skull crunched into it.

She instantly crumpled.

Talen leapt, mercifully able to get his arms under her, breaking her fall at the last instant.

Stretched out across the wooden planks, his arms under her, he froze for a long moment, waiting for her to wake up, to move. When she didn’t, he set her long onto the floor and frantically moved next to her. His hand went onto her chest, his fingertips pressing down into the flesh just above her left breast.

A heartbeat. Lungs expanding.

Relief surged through his veins. She’d merely knocked herself into blackness. And she was going to have a walnut-sized lump on her head.

Exhaling his held breath, he stretched out along his side on the floor next to her. With his head propped on his left bicep, his right hand didn’t move from her chest where he measured her heartbeat, her breaths.

He stared at her face, taking stock of the bruises quickly fading, only yellowish streaks left under the skin. The cuts about her lips had faded to faint pink streaks. Her left eye no longer swollen.

A sigh overtook him. “From a cocoon of bruises and pain, you emerge. What am I going to do with you?”

Tufts of feathers that had been kicked up still drifted in the air. Landing on her forehead, on her hair. He blew a puff of breath sideways to dislodge a feather that landed on his cheek.

A knock and the door to his office cracked open behind him. Was there no blasted privacy in this place?

“Ye well, boss? All the noise stopped. Ye said not to bother ye no matter the noise. But now there’s none.”

He didn’t bother to flip his head around to glance back at his man, Simon. “Aye. I’m well.”

“The lady well?”

“Aye. She will be.”

His fingers on her chest curled slightly.

She would be.

He would see to it.

{ Chapter 9 }

Leaning close to the small round mirror propped atop the rosewood desk in her room, Ness prodded at the lump on her forehead. Verity had been kind enough to set a simple braid into her hair before disappearing into the bowels of the Alabaster, and though removing all the pins in her hair had helped, it hadn’t stopped the pain.

Her head had been pounding for hours and even the slightest touch of her fingertips along the lump sent sharp pangs into her skull. Her face had only just returned to its normal shape after the beating and now this.

She’d woken up on the floor of Talen’s office to see him sitting next to her, his back against the wall, watching her. Concern evident on his face, his light blue eyes intent on her. His look almost making her squirm.

He didn’t care for what had happened. It’d been her own fault, slamming into the mantel as she did. Stupid to not have her balance before she’d picked up that chair, but he’d made her so furious and the feathers were so slippery.

Everything was so easy for him, including baiting her into attacking him. And she fell for it every time. Though she was getting stronger. Smarter. Quicker. She could feel that in her bones. And her broken arm barely held her back anymore.

But the anger that tinged the corners of his eyes in that moment when she opened her eyes made him look dangerous. Dangerous in how he looked at her.

Odd, unless she’d misunderstood those few short seconds when she had been frozen in his arms, their lips near to touching. The man was too virile, and heaven help her, in those moments, she wanted everything that Talen was. The heat of him. His lips. His hands rough on her body.

All of him on her.

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