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“It’s finally running clear,” Murtagh announced from somewhere over me. He turned off the water and sat me up, then passed me a folded towel.
I crushed the towel into my eyes and then looked over at Murtagh. He was still a little fuzzy, but he was top-to-bottom brown with probably an inch of dust.
“Where’s Caspian?”
“Showering.” He turned his head towards the bedroom, where we could hear him and Miles in a very animated conversation. He turned back to me and pulled me off the counter, leaving a streak of dirt on every inch that I had been lying across. “Which is what you and I are going to do right now.”
I looked around for my bracelet, and as soon as I had it in my hand, he yanked it right back out of it and put it in his pocket before pulling me behind him towards a nearby bathroom.
He did not undress me nicely once inside the bathroom. He turned on the shower, and while that was getting hot, he turned to me and started to yank off my clothing in a manner that was very far from romantic.
“Hey, I feel a little sore, so how about gentle?” I asked after he pulled my shirt over my head like it was on fire.
“You want to know how I feel? I was just pummeled with falling rocks!” he snapped at me, ripping my jeans open and shoving them down my legs.
I felt like a very bad puppy. I stepped out of my jeans and watched as he glared at me while he undressed.
“I’m sorry,” I assured him. I felt very naked. Sure; we’d had sex a few times, he’d seen me naked. But right now… I felt like my nakedness was a vulnerability. “It was an honest mistake.”
He put up his hand like he couldn’t hear me talking any longer. Even his shoulders went up, like the sound of my voice was becoming painful. He took my wrist and pushed me into the shower, following closely behind me.
Mud came out of our hair.
“Honest mistakes,” he said finally in retort, “Are accidentally cutting someone in line, or dropping keys down a drain. We were in a very dangerous place, and you seemed to understand that, and then you just reached over and grabbed something.”
“You grabbed shit from the wall, like the torches. You lit all the lanterns in the place! What if there was an explosion? What if lighting a torch sent a giant boulder chasing after us or some such shit?” I argued.
“We needed to see, for starters. For seconds, torches are normal for these sorts of finds! They used them for centuries. Including when I came to this stupid realm!” He argued back, sluicing the muddy water away from his angry face. “You just grabbed that bauble for no reason.”
“You don’t know what it’s like being me!” I assured him because I didn’t feel like there was no reason. I really wanted that thing. I wanted that diamond, too. It was hard to imagine that it was just sitting in Murtagh’s pocket somewhere on the bathroom floor. So disrespectful. And this was one of the men who wanted children with me? What? Would he leave a baby on the floor?
“We are like you. We’re one hundred percent from Daconia, while you still have human blood. Don’t you think we might feel it more than you? Trust me, we get it. But I had more self-discipline than you did when I was seven,” he assured me firmly. “You don’t even try to control yourself. Now come here,” he said, pulling me under the water and washing my hair out.
He could have been gentler. I didn’t know if he was scrubbing my skin to be thorough or if he was trying to punish me, because his scrubbing felt painful. By the time he turned off the shower, I was clean, but I felt like my skin was scrubbed off head-to-toe.
“I don’t know why you had to scrub that hard,” I pouted as I grabbed a towel from the bar on the wall.
“Because what fell on us was probably an ancient crypt, and I don’t want any bone-dust on you,” he growled, yanking a towel off the wall as well and putting it around his waist.
And now I was grossed out. “Urgh!” I said, cringing.
I tossed the towel aside and got back under the water. I washed myself again as he got out of the shower and got dressed. In fact, I kept scrubbing myself until he came back, fully dressed in clean clothes, and turned off the shower.
I didn’t realize how upset he was until he grabbed my arm and marched me out of the bathroom. Because the diamond—his diamond, the diamond that we did all this shit for that he needed to get back home with—was still in his coat. On the floor. He was leaving it.
Because he wasn’t thinking about diamonds.
He wasn’t thinking about going home.
He was thinking about dealing with me.
And I was in trouble.
Suddenly, I tried to backtrack. I yanked my arm away from him and turned to run, but he snatched my wrist and jerked just hard enough for me to lose my balance. I fell towards him, and he swept me off my feet and carried me while I was kicking and screaming to the bed, and still I fought.
“You and I are going to have a discussion about self-control,” Murtagh began, and I gulped.
“We don’t have to talk about anything. I think we’ve talked just enough!” I tried. For a moment, I escaped his hold, but then he grabbed me again, and somewhere in the scuffle, I lost my towel, which left me completely naked.
