"Fine. You didn't know," he disgustedly retorted. "Let's just say it was all a fucking dream. Now if you'll just wash his come off you, we can end this discussion. Get into the tub."
"How dare you be angry at me." Her brows rose and she surveyed him, challenge in her gaze. "Are you accusing me of complicity?"
"Maybe you were just being sociable. We both know how friendly you can be," he acidly finished. "But we can argue the finer points of hospitality later. I'm tired. Let's get this over with. I want his come off you," he said in a low, savage murmur. "Either you do it or I will."
Her temper flared. "I'm not yours to command."
His mouth lifted in a tight, brutal smile. "If Hussein can have authority over you," he silkily breathed, "so can I."
"I am not arguing about this." She sat up straighter, lifting her chin defiantly. She'd come too far, both in spirit and distance, to take orders from any man. "Nor do I care to be the target of your cynical reproach."
He gently shook his head as if in disbelief. "Amazing. First convenient amnesia and now what? Outrage?" His voice went flat. "Just fucking
get
into the tub."
"While you saved me and I thank you," she said with stinging ire, "you don't own me.
No one
owns me."
"Hussein Djeritl owned every little inch of your flesh, Lady Grosvenor," he savagely growled. "Are you sore from that big gold dildo he was ramming up your cunt?"
"Stop!" she cried, horrified, shamed afresh by the humiliating image. Taking a deep calming breath, she spoke, her voice slightly shaking. "I don't know what Hussein did or didn't do." Another steadying breath was required to displace further contemplation of what vile things he may have done to her. "But I'm very grateful to be alive, and if your masculine sense of honor was somehow offended, I'm sorry. I wasn't a participant in whatever happened. I don't even
know
what happened." Her hand had turned white-knuckled as she clutched the sheet to her throat. "I have no memory of the events—none. And if a gold dildo was involved or anything else that gives you displeasure, listen to me," she said, leaning forward, her voice no more than a whisper, "fuck your righteous indignation.
I don't care
!"
"But I do," he ground out.
"Too damn bad." Each word was icy.
"For you," he brusquely muttered.
She gazed at him for a moment, at his scowling wrath and arrogant lounging pose. "Are you threatening me?"
"Just making you aware of my feelings."
"In that case, let me clarify the state of
my
feelings. You can go screw yourself."
"I've an alternative," he malevolently drawled.
"Just so long as it doesn't involve me."
"Sorry." He set the bottle down very gently, his motions that careful precision of three bottles imbibed.
"What are you doing?" Bristling with anger, she stared at him.
He looked up. "I'm putting these bottles under the chair."
"Why?" Contentious, accusatory, she was on the offensive.
"I'm very neat." He rose from the chair, a faint smile registering his uncharitable wit. "And then again I wouldn't want you to cut your feet on any glass." He wasn't smiling now, standing in the center of the room, still booted and spurred, his clothes bloody from the butchery in Hussein's tent, his eyes burning with affront. "Your bathwater is getting cold."
"Arrogant bastard. I don't want a bath." Offended, indignant, she retreated into the far corner of the bed.
"I'll help you," he said, as if she'd not spoken.
"Stay away from me."
"It's only a bath, not the guillotine."
"Then let it go." Each word was pronounced with stiletto precision.
"I wish I could. But I have this aversion to fucking someone through the last man's come."
"Will I be pure enough for you after a bath?" she insolently inquired.
"Clean enough, anyway. Let's not have undue expectations."
"You hypocrite," she snapped. "As if you're morally guiltless."
"This conversation is getting off track, darling," he silkily countered. "I just want you to take a bath so I can fuck you."
"How romantic. Do you
get
good results with that line?"
"You'll have to tell me sometime how you charm Turkish generals," he acerbically retorted, moving forward.
"Don't you dare touch me."
It was the worst possible thing to say to a man who'd witnessed what he'd witnessed in Hussein Djeritl's tent. "I'll touch you where I wish, when I wish, as often as I wish," he said, his voice no more than a whisper.
Pressed against the headboard, she gauged the distance to the door as he approached and when he reached for her, she leaped from the bed. She'd almost reached the door when his fingers closed on her arm. "Don't be so foolish as to run again," he softly said. "It's only a fuck."
"You're as bad as Hussein." She tried to shake his hand away.
"Was," he corrected, his grip crushing as he turned her around. "Makriyannis has his head in his saddlebag."
"His head?" she whispered, shock widening her eyes.
He towered over her, his fingers like a vise on her arm. "His or ours—it was an easy choice."
"Oh, my God," she breathed.
"If you're feeling sorry for Hussein, consider he died happy, with his hand in your cunt."
"You're vicious," she bitterly accused.
"I saved your life."
She shut her eyes briefly, reality suddenly too harsh and uncompromising. Against the larger issues of life and death, her cavil and censure seemed woefully insignificant. Pasha had come through an army to save her, after all, undaunted by the insuperable odds against him. "What do you want me to do?" she said on a quiet exhalation of breath, no longer able to decipher good from bad, right from wrong, salvation from vengeance. "Just tell me and I'll do it." He was hating her for reasons she couldn't control, couldn't recall, and she was tired of fighting over issues that didn't make sense, that didn't matter in a country where people were dying every minute.
"I want you to take a bath."
"Fine." She shook his hand from her arm and turned away, walking toward the tub. A hush fell, the room suddenly alive with summer night sounds, the scent of oleander invading the air. Reaching the battered copper tub, she unwrapped the sheet, let it fall to the floor, and stepped into the water.
Pasha forgot for a moment that he was standing in a room in the mountains of Morea with war minutes, seconds away. Her lush form momentarily arrested time, his breathing stopped, and as he watched her, hatred for Hussein Djeritl rose like bile in his throat.
He flexed his fingers, jealousy choking him, the image on the divan playing over and over again in his mind, the possibility of a pregnancy too repulsive to consider.
"Tell me when I'm clean enough for you," she said, the acerbic edge back in her voice. Sainthood had always eluded her.
"When I can't smell him anymore," he coolly replied, beginning to unbutton his jacket. "I'll let you know."
She wouldn't look at him, washing herself with a concentration that shut out everything but the simple act of bathing. All else was too complicated and awful, rife with rancor, shame. A nightmare she didn't want to remember.
Stripped to his breeches, Pasha sat and drank, watching her, his fury barely under control because the exquisite nude woman before him was only recently under Hussein—the memory so cursed and foul, he wasn't sure he could contain his need for vengeance.
When she finished, he didn't move to help her from the tub. She shot him a glance as heated as his, stepped from the bath, reached for a towel, and dried herself. "Would you like a smell?" she rudely inquired, standing nude and resentful, not sure she could continue to be grateful against such overt rancor.
"Later. Get into bed." He could have been saying pistols at dawn, his voice was that chill.
"And if I don't?"
"I'll fuck you on the floor."
"I'd forgotten the full degree of your charm."
"Yours of course is always amenable to a man with a hard-on."
"I'm not going to apologize for being alive, if that's what you want," she said with a quiet defiance. "What should I have done? Killed myself to save your honor?"
There was no answer of course. Nor did he give one, save a deepening scowl.
"That's what I thought," she said, tossing her towel aside. "So while you sulk and carry on like some pure-as-a-virgin cleric"—her brows rose in sardonic mockery—"definitely a new role for you, I'm going to have something to eat. I'd appreciate it, though, if you'd bathe. You've blood on your hands," she coolly noted, moving toward the table.
Glancing down, Pasha saw the stains on his hands, and he remembered Hussein's severed head spraying blood, and then the image of the Turk's body poised over Trixi. He forcibly shook away the reprehensible picture in his mind. But a renewed anger infused his brain, so hot and wrathful it brought him to his feet in a surge of power that toppled the chair.
Spinning around at the explosive crash of chair and bottles, Trixi saw Pasha bearing down on her in great furious strides.
Backing away, she snatched up one of the liquor bottles on the table and raised it like a club. "Stay away from me," she cried.
He came to a sudden stop, the high-pitched tremor in her voice infiltrating his mindless rage.
Infiltrating but not assuaging.
"You don't really think that's going to stop me, do you?" he scoffed. He lifted his hand negligently in the direction of the bottle.
"Whatever you want, you're not going to
get
," she heatedly replied.
"Perhaps we differ on that point."
"What are you going to do? Make me pay in some way for your damned resentment?"
"You seemed to like fucking Hussein so much," he retorted, outrage in every syllable, "I thought I'd fuck you until you can't move. And then I'll fuck you some more."
"Because I'm to blame," she murmured, bitterness dripping from every word.
"Something like that."
"And you're my judge and jury."
"You get the picture." Nothing was clear save the violence of his feelings. "What if you're pregnant by him? Have you thought of that?"
She turned white. She hadn't, not in the remotest part of her brain. But she couldn't change what had happened. Nor could she have stopped the abduction or any of the ensuing events—so what the hell did he want her to do, grovel basely at his feet? "Or I could be pregnant by you," she said instead, plain and cool and caustic as he.
"You bitch," he whispered so softly only his lips moved.
"Have we reached an impasse?" She cast him an oblique glance, rude and impudent.
"Get the fuck into bed." Curt, hard, uncompromising words.
In an abrupt, furious downswing, she struck the bottle on the table edge with such force shattered glass flew across the room. "Come and get me," she malevolently purred, holding up the jagged bottle neck, hotspur temper in her eyes.
"Jesus," he breathed, shocked out of his black rage by the incongruous image. He held his hands out in a propitiatory gesture. "Relax," he murmured, his voice deliberately calm. "Just relax now."
"I don't
feel
like relaxing," she caustically noted. "I wonder if it has something to do with being abducted
again
by some man who thinks he can make me a prisoner
again
." She spat the last word. "I wonder if being threatened with the same
ridiculous
masculine possessiveness I just escaped might make me
uninterested
in relaxing. Actually," she hotly declared, "I'm thinking about making
you
pay for offending me. Just for a bloody change of pace."
His mouth had begun twitching midway through her tirade and when she finished, he was smiling faintly, the malevolence vanished from his eyes. "Did I say something wrong?"
"How astute," she whispered, her gaze narrowed.
"And you don't think I should be angry."
"Not at me." Her weapon was still poised.
"And if I yield," he softly proposed, concerned she might actually attempt to use the lethal weapon and hurt herself, "will you put that down?"
"You must apologize." The words were softly put, but her tone was uncompromising.
"For what?" A flash of frustration illuminated his eyes.
"For insulting me."
"You were the one in bed with him." Willful, his jaw obstinately set, he glared at her.
"Apologize." As headstrong, she glared back.
"And if I do?" A mixture of moodiness and restraint was in his voice.
"I won't have to kill you," she sardonically replied.
His laughter erupted, a deep-throated guffaw that bent him over double, brought him staggering and chuckling to the bed, where he collapsed in a fit of muffled mirth.
"It wasn't
that
funny," she testily remarked, setting the broken bottle down with a twinge of embarrassment.
Lying on his back, he opened his arms wide and smiled at her. "Yes, it was. Come here."
"You still haven't apologized." She wasn't so easily appeased.
"Do I have to?"
She nodded.
He grimaced briefly. "It's that important?"
Her nostrils flared and she nodded again.
"Then I apologize," he quietly said, this man who had never apologized to a woman before, "for intent and misjudgment, for my rudeness." And Hussein's dead, he thought, his own partial indemnity for the muddied, violent disorder of his emotions. "Did I say it right?" he went on, his gaze traveling down the voluptuous, bewitching woman standing nude and barefoot amidst glistening glass shards.
"Yes, thank you." She required recompense for his slurs and aspersions. "I am what I am, you know. Take it or leave it."
"I'll take it," he said, not moving, not sure he'd answered properly, not completely sure any more of this woman who had threatened to kill him for his insults. But he had no intention of leaving her. None at all. "You probably shouldn't move with all that glass," he added, sitting up. "Let me lift you away."
She looked down, suddenly aware that she was standing naked in a bedchamber in an inn in Greece surrounded by broken glass, but more happy than sad, more pleased than angry, and all because of the man seated on the bed across the room smiling at her with a rare, tentative smile. "You're barefoot, too," she said as though all the recent turmoil had been about glass and bare feet.