of his hand against her shoulder so he wouldn’t have to lift his arm. If his muscles were tensed while she wrapped the linen, it would become loose when he relaxed.
“Where did you learn to do this?” Blake asked.
Sophia wasn’t sure if he sought to make conversation or if he really wanted to know the extent of her skills. A lump formed in her throat at the thought of sharing more of her life with him, but she gave him some of the truth. He could do with it what he wanted. “I have had some nursing experience in an infirmary of sorts.” Her hands moved over the wound stretching over three of his ribs. As she gingerly probed the area, Blake hissed and flinched from her touch.
“You’ve broken a rib or two.”
“I have not,” he scoffed as if he were a child, but his tone lacked any real conviction.
She gave him another of her best glares.
“Very well, I may have bruised the bone, but I don’t think anything’s broken.”
Silence fell as she did her best to pad the area. “Had we needle and thread, I would stitch this.” Another length of linen came away from her petticoat to make a piece long enough to wrap around his torso more than once.
“Why do they let you tend this clinic of sorts?”
Sophia’s hands stilled, her breath slowed, her eyelids fell. “Not all people think me lower than the dirt that mars their hems. And some don’t have the luxury of being nursed by a real physician.”
Warm fingers closed over her cold skin and squeezed just so. “I didn’t mean to insult you. I merely want to know the kind of life you lead. The real life. Not the one you talk up to defend your actions. I want to know who Sophia Martin is, who Little Sophie has become.”
A single tear escaped, rolled down her cheek to land on the mess that used to be her gown. When she met his frank gaze, she had to admit to a moment of terror even more frightening than being thrown from a moving carriage. It gave her a vision of the one person in the world who could know who she was. Who she wanted to be. Her deepest desires and darkest fears.
But he wasn’t the one—this man who insulted, berated and belittled. He couldn’t be the one to share her secrets with. She couldn’t trust him. She couldn’t trust anyone.
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” she eventually replied, tying the bandage off just below his armpit, checking with a slight tug of pressure that the knot would hold.
“And you don’t know who you are anymore.” Lifting the shirt he held in his hands and holding it to the gash on the side of her head, Blake’s voice held years of pain, emotion so familiar to her that she leaned away from his comfort and stood.
“Perhaps I don’t want to know.”
Blake could well believe she didn’t want to know her real identity. It might scare her into doing something drastic. In her society world where the sun shone every day on her happiness, had she lost sight of what it felt to be a real person? He wondered how long it had taken to talk herself into this level of veritable blindness. He wondered at the necessity for such an illusion.
There was a moment in her past that created that fear. He saw it in her eyes, in the tense line of her body, especially in the way she hesitated before getting close to him. Even before climbing on the bench with him in the cart, she’d eyed him warily as if to measure the chances he would grow a second head and attack her once they were out of town. But fear was nowhere to be found now as she tended to his injuries.
These tiny flashes of fear filled him with sadness, another factor that made her Sophia. Another stone of guilt to add to the pile that dragged at his shoulders. It was partly his fault that she’d run away. Not in any literal sense, no. His guilt came from her not knowing how deeply he felt about her all those years ago. Perhaps if she’d known the full extent of his love—that he would have laid down his own life for hers—she would have come to him, told him of her father’s plans. He would have run away with her. He would have taken her all the way to freedom