Sweet Rogue of Mine (The Survivors #9) - Shana Galen Page 0,43
he’d had his share of liaisons, and the last of those had been a long, long time ago.
He had thought he would never meet a willing woman again. He would not pay for a woman and so, at one and thirty, that part of his life was over.
I’m a woman.
Why had she said that? She couldn’t possibly want him. He lifted his hand from the sheets where it rested and brought it to his face. Pushing his hair off his forehead, he touched the brow of his left eye. Slowly, he slid his hand down and along the knotted scar that snaked over his eyelid. The doctor had said he was fortunate not to lose his eye. Nash didn’t know what difference it made if he could not see out of it.
Unfortunately, he could still remember the moments before the attack. He could remember the yellow of the sun on the stone of the building where he had been hiding, the dark brown of his rifle butt, the familiar weight of it against his shoulder. In his periphery, there had been the blue of the sky and the white of fast-moving clouds. His hair had ruffled in the breeze. He wished he had known these would be his last images. He wished he had looked about and noticed a tree or a flower or something beautiful. But the last thing he remembered was staring down the length of his rifle. And then an explosion.
The troop’s leader, Neil Wraxall, had told Nash that a French sniper had fired at him. He’d told Nash he was fortunate because the shot had missed Nash and hit the stone of the building he was leaning against instead. Still, Nash had been unlucky in that the pieces of the stone had flown against his left eye, damaging it so badly that he’d lost his sight.
Ironically, his right eye had not been damaged. The doctors couldn’t really explain why Nash couldn’t see out of that eye. Something about an injury to the brain that damaged the part of the brain responsible for vision. Over time, a bit of sight had come back to his right eye. Nash had hoped the shadowy shapes would lighten and become clearer. He had hoped he might see color again. But as the days and weeks and months and years wore on, it became obvious that he would be forever relegated to this shadow world. Some days it seemed pointless to even use his vision. It was like looking down into a murky pond and trying to see the bottom. There were only vague outlines of things dark and indistinct.
The doctors had told him his other senses would sharpen to compensate. Nash couldn’t say whether they had or not. He’d wanted his vision back, goddamn it. At times he wondered if his limited vision in his right eye had improved as he could recognize differences in size and shape now. But then he thought he had simply become more used to the shadow world. And, of course, a hulking figure like Rowden was easily distinguished from a thin one like Miss Howard or a squat one like Mrs. Brown.
The despair that dragged at him constantly, trying to pull him into the shadow world and under the murky water permanently, tugged hard now. As The Cloud descended, Nash reached for his pistol reflexively. He stroked the filigree and took slow breaths. He realized now that he hadn’t thought about the pistol once when Miss Howard had been at Wentmore. Surely it had been in his pocket, as it always was, but he hadn’t reached for it, hadn’t remembered it was even there.
Was that why he wanted it to be afternoon again? Why he couldn’t seem to wait for her to return? Because she kept The Cloud from swallowing him whole? She’d said he was still angry, and he hadn’t corrected her. He would rather she think he was angry than know the truth—he was standing on the edge of a black, cavernous hole and very little kept him from tumbling down, down, down.
“GOOD MORNING, SIR,” said a man’s voice. Nash rolled over and ignored it. Just one of his father’s servants...
Bloody damn hell!
Nash bolted upright and felt for his pistol.
“I set the pistol on the nightstand, sir,” came the voice again. What the devil? He was not at his father’s town house. He was at Wentmore, and there was a strange man in his bedchamber.