05

Kai.

I had been smoking since I left the house, trying to calm my nerves in the one place where my father's voice couldn't reach me. The alley was dark, quiet, and blessedly empty.

Taking a long drag, I let the smoke fill my lungs before releasing it slowly. It was late enough that most people had gone to bed, which meant I could finally think without someone demanding something from me.

My father had been relentless today, more relentless than usual, anyway.

First, it was the same lecture about how being single made me weak. How not having a wife would cost me my title. Then came the blind date he'd arranged without asking, which I'd deliberately sabotaged because I wasn't in the mood to pretend to be interested in another woman he'd picked out.

The fight that followed was inevitable.

"You keep this up and I am giving your title to your brother!" he had shouted, his face turning red the way it always did when he didn't get his way.

"Either find yourself a wife from the women I've chosen, or go out and find your own mate. But you will marry someone, Charles. I won't have you losing everything because of your stubbornness."

I had said things I didn't mean. Ugly things. Things that had made him threaten to actually follow through on his promise to hand the title over to my younger brother, who'd been waiting in the wings like a vulture for years.

So now I was here, smoking in an alley in the middle of the night, trying to burn away the anger and the frustration and the weight of expectations I had never asked for.

I took another drag and got lost in my thoughts, the cigarette smoke curling around my face. I didn't hear her coming until it was too late.

She hit me hard enough that we both nearly went down, but I caught her before we did. For a split second, I thought maybe she would run into me on purpose until I realized she wasn't moving.

"I'm sorry, I didn't"I started, but the words died in my throat.

She was unconscious and bleeding. The blood was trickling down her face, dark against her pale skin.

"Shit," I muttered, dropping my cigarette and shrugging off my jacket. I pressed it against the wound on her head, trying to stop the flow of blood. She was small fragile-looking, even and completely limp in my arms.

I didn't hesitate. I picked her up and carried her back to my place. Once home, I laid her carefully on my bed and just stared at her for a moment.

I had never done this before, brought a strange woman to my bed andever felt this sudden, inexplicable pull toward someone I didn't know.

Looking at her more closely, I could see the tear tracks on her cheeks. Dried now, but there. Whatever wound was on her head wasn't an accident, someone had hurt her. Someone had done this to her intentionally.

"What were you doing out so late?" I asked quietly, knowing she couldn't hear me. Not expecting an answer.

Her face was striking. Not conventionally pretty, but arresting. The kind of face that made you want to keep looking. High cheekbones, delicate features, a mouth that even unconscious seemed to be saying something.

I realized I was staring and forced myself to move, right. She was bleeding, and needed to tend to her wounds.

I had some basic medical training, so I started carefully cleaning the blood away from the injury. I needed to see how bad it was, which meant I had need to get her clothes off. I hesitated, my hands lingering on the hem of her shirt.

She had been fast. Someone had hurt her badly enough that she was bleeding and unconscious. The last thing she would want was for me to involve anyone else. If I told the staff, if I called for help, she might wake up and disappear before I got any answers.

I couldn't explain why that mattered to me. But it did.

So I carefully undressed her, trying to keep my mind clinical and failing miserably.

She was beautiful. Not just her face, all of her. Her skin was pale, almost luminous, and her body was exactly the kind of body that had no business existing outside of paintings. When I touched her face to examine the wound better, my fingers lingered longer than necessary.

I traced the line of her cheekbone, then her nose. I was being a creep, I knew that, but I couldn't seem to stop myself.

"What are you doing?" she mumbled suddenly.

I jerked my hand away like I had been burned and stood up so fast I nearly knocked over the chair beside the bed.

"You are awake," I said stupidly. Then, trying to compose myself, "You passed out. I found you and brought you here. You need a bath to get the blood off, and then I can properly dress the wound."

I pointed vaguely toward the bathroom, needing to put distance between us before she could see how flustered I was.

She didn't move, didn't acknowledge me. Her eyes were already closing again.

I waited for her to get up. She didn't.

When I turned back, she was unconscious again, her body completely still.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" I muttered to myself, actually slapping my own cheek this time. Hard enough to sting.

I wasn't the kind of man who felt things like this. Not attraction at first sight. Not whatever this was. I had built my entire life on the principle that emotion was weakness, that feeling things too deeply made you vulnerable.

And yet here I was, standing in my bedroom at three in the morning, staring at an unconscious stranger and feeling more awake than I had been in years.

I went to get water and towels, cleaned her up as gently as I could, treated the wound without waking her, trying to keep my hands steady and my mind out of the gutter.

The whole time, I kept thinking about staying, about waiting for her to wake up, about being there when she did.

But that wasn't who I was.

I finished what I needed to do, turned off the lights, and walked out of the guest room. I made a conscious decision right then and there, I wouldn't go back in until she was ready to leave.

It was the sensible thing to do.

Except sensible meant pacing around my study for the next three hours. Sensible meant trying to work on documents I couldn't focus on. Sensible meant hating myself for caring about a woman I didn't know.

Why had I left her alone? What if she woke up confused or in pain? What if she needed something?

I was being selfish. I had always been selfish. But this felt different, this felt like something I might actually regret.

Still, I stayed away. Because the alternative, admitting that I felt something for her, something real and immediate, it was worse.

At least, that was what I told myself as I stared at the door leading back to the guest room, my jaw clenched, my hands balled into fists.