Page 43 of Selling Innocence

Her voice trailed off, the hardness in her expression slipping away.

She reached out and touched my forearm, her fingers gentle as she pulled my arm, the move so surprising I didn’t react at first.

“You’re hurt,” she whispered.

I dropped my gaze to find blood soaked into my suit jacket. “It’s not deep,” I assured her. “It happened at the start, when the man swung the knife at us. I hardly noticed it.”

She blinked slowly, her expression flat, her skin quickly losing its color. After a long silent moment, she rushed out of her chair and into the bathroom, then came back with a first-aid kit clutched in her hands.

Now she acts like she’s panicked?

She’d dealt with the attackers without so much as a whimper or complaint, had used a hell of an impressive self-defense move, had even slid the clip of that pistol back into the gun with the certainty of a person used to guns, yet one little cut and she behaved as though the knife had hit a vital organ?

Who the hell is this girl?

“It’s fine,” I told her again as she kneeled on the floor in front of me. It made her appear even smaller, even younger, and my mind went straight into the gutter for one shameful moment.

Then again, with how busy I always was, I hadn’t made time for anything like women in months. Who could blame my primitive brain when a girl this pretty got on her knees in front of me?

However, she was young enough to be my daughter and in no position for me to even think about such things, so I tried to wrench my brain from that.

She tugged at my jacket until I removed it, then tried to undo the buttons at the cuff of my shirt. Her fingers trembled, making it impossible to work free the tiny pearl buttons.

I wanted to tell her again I was fine, that she didn’t have to worry, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t help any more than it had before. Sometimes panic only eased when the person saw everything was okay with their own eyes.

I extracted my arm from her death grip and undid the cuff, then rolled the bloodied fabric to my elbow. The shirt was done for anyway, since getting blood out of white shirts was a losing battle.

Just a fact of the job.

Once the wound appeared from beneath the sleeve, her eyes widened at the deep slash. It still bled, oozing slowly now, and probably only because my movement had reopened it.

I thought she’d freeze, that the panic beating at her would win. Leave it to Kenz to be stronger than she appeared, yet again, because she took an alcohol swab from the first-aid kit in her trembling fingers.

She tore one open, leaving the trash in the lid of the kit, then went about cleaning around the wound. Her touch was amazingly gentle, careful.

Nothing like when I treated myself or, worse, when one of my colleagues did it. I hired bodyguards for my company, people who knew how to do first aid and could stitch a wound if needed, but they’d never learned good bedside manner.

I wouldn’t mind getting hurt more if I had Kenz here patching me up afterward.

I shook away the unwelcome thought, both because it felt too dangerous and because the last thing I wanted was to panic her like this again.

“You don’t need stitches,” she said, her gaze pinned to her work.

“I told you it wasn’t bad.”

“You didn’t even treat it.”

“I knew it only needed to be cleaned and wrapped, and I had to contact the others then check in on you.”

“Why would you ignore this just to make sure my little feelings weren’t hurt?”

I caught her chin with my other hand, then lifted her dark eyes to mine.

She really is astoundingly lovely.

It was far from the first time I’d noticed it, but it might have been the first time I’d really accepted it, that I’d recognized it or allowed myself to think it.

Her hair was long and loose, tumbling down over her shoulders. Between her dark hair, her dark eyes, her dark eyebrows, her skin seemed to glow. Light freckles dotted her cheeks, but unless I was this close to her, I doubted I would have noticed them.

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