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Rafe clenched his teeth. Damn her irrepressible courage. How could she face him so coolly, wielding what was surely a torture device? He couldn’t allow her to have the upper hand.

He strained to return her smile. “Very well. How shall we proceed?”

Lady Rosslyn gestured to a chair at her right. “If you would sit over there and, ah, roll up your shirtsleeves, I w-would be most obliged.”

Had that been a tremor in her voice? Rafe sat and studied her closer. Her hands shook as she placed the needle, a cloth, and two small squares of glass on a tray. The objects rattled on the tray as she carried it toward him. So she was nervous after all.

He frowned. Suddenly her trepidation didn’t please him as much. She planned to stick him with that instrument, so it would be more comforting if she was confident about it.

Forcing a smile, he attempted to joke. “I say, Countess, I am unaccustomed to having my blood drawn.”

Her eyes narrowed and her lip curled in anger. “Please do not call me that. It’s only a courtesy title, a silly one at that…and I get the feeling you mock me with it.”

Rafe blinked in surprise at her sudden shift in demeanor. A twinge of guilt gnawed in his gut. Perhaps he had mocked her a little. “What shall I call you then?”

“Well, as I cannot legally be addressed as ‘Doctor,’ Cassandra will have to do.” Bitterness laced her voice.

“Cassandra…” For the first time since he’d performed the Marking ritual, Rafe tasted her name on his tongue and found it to be as rich as ever.

She shivered once more, so he decided to put her at ease before she came near him with that needle. “What made you want to become a doctor anyway?”

With the impressive amount of knowledge she’d displayed at the dinner party the previous evening, she must have harbored her ambition for some time.

Cassandra blinked at his inquiry, wide green eyes full of suspicion.

When Rafe continued to look on with polite interest, she sighed. “I’ve always been fascinated with how things work. I had a cuckoo clock when I was a little girl. One day it quit working and I opened it up to see what was inside.”

Rafe chuckled and shook his head in admiration. “You disassembled an entire clock when you were but a child?”

Cassandra nodded, a nostalgic smile playing across her lush lips…lips he would soon claim. “As you can imagine, the mass of gears and cogs was quite overwhelming. I asked my father for a book on clocks. He was skeptical at first. I studied for months until I was able to understand how the devices function.” Bending down in front of him, she took his hand and continued her story. “My clock had a worn gear. Papa took the gear to the clockmaker and had a new one made. I installed it myself and repaired the clock.”

“Amazing,” Rafe couldn’t help saying aloud. He’d spent his childhood climbing trees and frolicking in the fields with his cousins. Had she had no one to play with? The thought prompted him to ask, “Were you an only child?”

She nodded indifferently, and before he was aware of it, she’d pricked the ring finger of his bad hand with the needle.

He chuckled, watching her place a drop of blood on one of the tiny glass panes and cover it with the other. “Sly wench.”

How lonely she must have been without even knowing it. Fighting back sympathy, Rafe leaned back in the chair. “What made you go from clocks to medicine?”

Her delicate face and form seemed to reverberate with a deep chord of pain. “My mother died a year later from dropsy. My father perished soon after from a heart ailment, just as my late husband did. Since then, I’ve been studying the human body and how it functions.” She lifted her chin in determination and took a deep breath. “I may not have been able to save my parents, but perhaps I can save another little girl from becoming an orphan.”

Rafe stared at her in wonder. Unlike most mortals who crumbled in the face of such misery, she had found inspiration and built her dream from loneliness and tragedy.

Cassandra blotted his finger with a clean cloth. Rafe could have told her to spare the effort yet he refrained, enjoying her touch. Slowly, she trailed her fingers along his forearm. He knew she was probing, examining, but it felt so good.

“How did this happen?” she asked suddenly.

He attempted a stern glare. “You will never give up until you hear the story, will you?”

“Of course not.” She fixed him with an equally level gaze. “If I do not know the cause of an injury, it will be much more difficult to discern its treatment.”

Rafe took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Very few knew the tale. But after hearing Cassandra’s heartrending story, he felt that confiding in her would be a fair trade.

His good fist clenched at his side at the infuriating, humiliating memory. “It was my temper that did it. I was traveling to London. I’d just begun the journey and had taken up residence in a cave outside of San Sebastian for the day before I could catch a ship. Exhausted from traveling, I didn’t wake up soon enough. A vampire hunter nearly staked me in the heart. I killed the man, but there was another one.” Rafe closed his eyes as regret washed over him. “Blind with rage, I chased the other hunter out of the cave and into the sun. I had hold of him and didn’t let go until my face and arm caught flame. I was such a fool.”

“We all make mistakes.” The compassion in her eyes was enough to undo him. She opened her mouth to say something else, then gasped, suddenly examining the finger she’d recently pricked more closely. “Your finger is healed!”

He nodded impatiently. “Yes, we heal very quickly most of the time.”