When he might have held her against him even longer, content simply to feel her beside him, Jordana drew back. “Your wound, Nathan.” She glanced down at her hand, which had been resting against his abdomen. The palm was stained red. “It’s still bleeding. Let me take care of you now.”
The injury was already healing. He knew it would mend soon enough on its own, but he didn’t resist as she took him by the hand and led him through the villa, into a lavish bathroom adjoining the large master bedroom suite.
“Sit there.” She pointed to the white marble edge of a deep soaking tub. As he obeyed her soft command, she went about gathering a supply of clean washcloths and towels. When she returned, she set them down next to him, then carefully untucked his body-hugging black shirt from his pants. “Can you lift your arms?”
He did as she asked, realizing only now that this was the first time in his life that anyone had cared for him in such a way.
The only time he’d ever permitted anyone to care for him like this.
Or wanted it so fervently.
A dark memory tried to push through his subconscious as Jordana gently drew his ruined shirt away from the sticky mess of his injury. Her hands were so tender, so light on him after she laid the shirt aside and knelt down to inspect the wound.
She ran water onto one of the washcloths from the tub faucet, then wiped away the worst of the blood with aching care. The cloth was cool against his torn flesh, a balm almost as soothing as her sweet attention.
Yet in the back of his mind, Nathan felt the bite of a lash. He heard the clamor of chains. Smelled the oily stench of blood-soaked metal and stone.
He had to battle every instinct he had not to shove her touch away.
Jordana must have sensed the tension in him. Glancing up now, her lovely face was pinched with concern. “Am I hurting you?”
“No.” The word came out strangled, thick with restraint.
She went back to her careful ministrations, hesitantly now. She watched him too closely. She had to feel the rigidity of his muscles, the torment in all of his senses, as he struggled to hold back the ugliness of his past while she touched him so lovingly.
“Nathan, if you don’t want me to touch you … if you want me to stop—”
“No. Fuck, no. I’ll never want that.” He reached out to caress her face, gutted that she would think he’d reject any part of her now, after all they’d been through together. He uttered a harsh, low curse, hating that his ugly past had invaded here. “You’re not doing anything wrong. It’s just …”
He couldn’t hold her innocent gaze. He didn’t want her to see through him to the Hunter he’d never totally managed to leave behind.
He didn’t want her to see the scars that had never fully healed, despite that his Breed genetics had hidden all outside traces of them.
Jordana reached up to grasp his fingers where they lay against her cheek. “You can tell me when you’re ready … or not at all. I’ll love you either way.”
Her promise was so sweet, so patient, any words he might have offered just then got strangled in his tight throat.
What would she say if she knew what his handlers had done to him, how they’d eventually broken him?
What would she think if she knew what he’d done to survive?
As she went back to tending him, the memories flooded in. He couldn’t stop them.
And he knew that if he didn’t spit them out, his past would always stand in the way of the future he hoped to have with Jordana.
“In the program, they had tests to cull the most viable Hunters from the rest,” he murmured, his voice sounding wooden in the quiet of the bathroom. “They tested things like physical strength, linear and abstract thinking, problem solving. They tested endurance, and the ability to withstand pain. All kinds of pain.”
Jordana’s hands stilled. Slowly, she sat back on her heels in front of him, listening in utter silence, a quiet dread in her eyes. “Nathan …”>“What kind of protection?” Nathan asked.
Zael indicated the silvery crystal he wore on the leather thong at his wrist. “This is crafted from a larger source of energy belonging to our people. The colony has one, and so does Selene. At one time, very long ago, the realm had five of these crystals, much larger than this small, harvested piece. The crystals are sacred to the Atlantean people. They shielded us from the world outside and kept the realm safe from enemies who would want to destroy us.”
Beside Jordana, Nathan studied Zael’s bracelet with narrowed scrutiny. “That material’s nothing found on this Earth.”
“No,” Zael said. “My people, like the Ancients who fathered your kind, the Breed, were from somewhere else. The two races were at war, in fact. Even before fate brought them here.”
Nathan swore under his breath. “Is that why another of your kind, Reginald Crowe, recently boasted before he died that the Atlantean queen has been plotting a new war—one against both mankind and the Breed?”
“Selene is a bitter queen.” Zael grunted. “Worse, she’s a scorned woman. I can’t say what she’s plotting, but it’s rare that she’s not looking for reasons to fight or enemies to destroy. It wasn’t always that way with her.”