Page 31 of To Heist and to Hold

She frowned, tracing them, trying to deduce what they could be. Which was perhaps too obvious; he suddenly stilled beneath her. His hands, which had been doing their own slow exploration, stilled as well, splaying across her back. Face heating, she was about to blurt out an apology when he spoke.

“It’s your turn, you know,” he murmured, his lips brushing against her neck in the most maddening fashion.

She blinked. “What?”

“Your turn. For our game.” He took her shoulders in his hands then, gently pushing her back far enough that he could look her in the eye. “You can ask me something. If you wish.” His lips quirked then, his eyes sparkling ruefully in the low light. “If you’re not fainthearted, that is.”

“You can be assured,” she declared automatically, “I am not the least bit fainthearted.”

He lifted one eyebrow. Yet she saw the glimmer of something vulnerable beneath it all. He was giving her permission to ask him something that must be quite sensitive, offering to open himself up to her. Her heart swelled.

Even so, she found it difficult to outright ask why his skin was so marred. He must have seen her hesitation; after a pause, he sighed softly and set her on the couch beside him before turning slightly so she might witness what she had only felt.

How she managed to keep from gasping in shock, she would never know.

She had seen her fair number of wounds and scars, of course.

Working in her uncle’s smithy for so many years, she had been witness to countless burns and cuts, not to mention the broken bones her uncle had set and the gashes he had stitched, a blacksmith’s job not stopping at mere metalworking.

But this was completely different. Even in the dim light she could see the angry crisscrossing of puckered skin, a veritable lattice of cruelty.

With shaking fingers she reached out, traced one particularly deep gouge.

He didn’t so much as flinch; rather he was preternaturally still, allowing her to explore, to take it in.

“It must hurt still,” she murmured thickly.

He shrugged. “Some. The skin is tight and needs frequent stretching.”

She swallowed hard. “What happened?”

He turned back to her then, his lips hitching up in one corner, though there was a shadow of pain in the expression.

“It’s not an uncommon story,” he said, voice rumbling in the dim room.

He pulled her against him, giving a small sigh as she settled against his side.

“I was winning at the tables of a seedy hell, and handsomely, too. I’m uncommonly good at cards, you see.

It was how I supported my family after my father abandoned us, the one bit of talent I could use to keep us from starving. ”

He huffed a small, humorless laugh, and Heloise tightened her arm about his waist. “The owners didn’t like it one bit,” he continued.

“They claimed they didn’t have the blunt to pay me and gave me a gold watch worth far more than my winnings.

I, fool that I was, accepted it, thinking only of what it could provide to make my mother’s life easier.

But the owners of the hell cried theft. I was arrested and whipped as punishment. ”

“They more than whipped you,” she said through a tight throat, the image of those scars burned into her brain.

Again he laughed, though there was something bitter in it now. “It seems the man in charge of my punishment liked his job a bit too well. I nearly died as a result.”

“And Mr. Teagan and Mr. Parsons were there for you,” she said quietly.

“Yes. And after as well, when my mother died from the strain of it all. She was already unwell from the stress of my father leaving her; my own misstep pushed her over the edge and finally killed her.”

“Oh, Ethan,” she whispered into his chest, tears burning her eyes at the echo of self-hatred in his voice. “It wasn’t your fault.”

But besides the faintest tightening of his fingers on her arm, he gave no sign of hearing her.

“Teagan and Parsons helped me feed and clothe my brothers and keep a roof over their heads until I was healed enough to work myself.” He paused.

“They have been by my side for every moment of my life since I first met them until now. I would be a fool to forget that.”

She frowned. Why did he seem to be explaining the whole thing to himself as much as he was explaining it to her? As if he was trying to remind himself of something in the telling of it?

But as they lay there wrapped in each other’s arms, the cacophony of the club a distant buzzing in her ears, she couldn’t help wondering how a man who had been so horribly wronged in the past could lower himself to cheat his own patrons.

It made no sense, no sense at all. Was he as much of a victim in this as Julia was?

It was a thought that both made her weak with relief and consumed her with a bitter guilt because, no matter the truth, she had to see this infiltration of his club through no matter the cost. Even if that cost could break her heart.