The Cowboy Wanted a Virgin Bride — But Froze When She Taught Him The First Night

 PART 2

She did not go to the room he’d given her.

She turned instead toward his — pushed the door open like she already knew the shape of the space behind it.

Boon stood in the doorway of his own bedroom, in his own house, and felt like a trespasser.

Calla lit the lamp, then reached for the bundle of dried herbs he kept in his dresser drawer for the nights he couldn’t sleep — herbs he’d never understood how to use properly. She turned them over once, unimpressed.

“Wrong plant. This one keeps a man awake more than it settles him.”

From the pocket of her dress she took a second bundle, freshly cut, the leaves still green. She set a basin of water on the wash-stand and crushed the leaves into it, and a sharp, clean smell filled the room — something that made his head feel oddly alert and heavy at once.

“Sit. Give me your hand.”

He obeyed before he’d decided to. That was the part that frightened him most — not the request, but how little resistance he found in himself against it.

She took his right hand in both of hers and turned it palm-up under the lamp, exposing the scarred knuckles for the first time to anyone but himself. She dipped a cloth into the herb water and began cleaning the dried blood from the newest split in the skin, her touch careful, unhurried, entirely unlike the touch of a woman meeting a stranger for the first time that morning.

“Your hands aren’t scarred from ranch work,” she said, not looking up. “I’ve watched you all day. I know what I’m looking at.”

“You know nothing about me.”

“I took care of my father for two years while he drank himself into the ground. I know exactly what I’m looking at.”

He tried to pull his hand back. Her grip held it steady without any force at all — just the plain fact that he hadn’t actually tried very hard.

“You married a woman who knew nothing because you wanted someone who couldn’t hurt you. I understand why. I’m not asking you to explain yourself tonight. I’m asking you to let me wrap your hand before you bleed on your own bedsheets.”

He sat there under lamplight, his hand held in hers, a stranger’s fingers pressed against wounds he’d spent five years hiding from every living soul — and for the first time since the day he buried a name he never spoke out loud, Boon Slater let someone see exactly what he did to himself in the dark.