Gentle feminine fingers traced a scar on his chest, so tender that the touch felt like the brush of a butterfly's wings. He should've been amused that she thought she might hurt him. Instead, his heart thundered as a hint of some powerful understanding hovered just over the edge of his horizon.
"You didn't get these because you were a fast runner. They hurt you badly." Her eyes dared him to explain the scars away. This woman he'd married wouldn't be soothed so easily when someone she cared for was hurt. It took him a moment to overcome his astonishment at the realization that both his wife's words and her careful touch arose from a belief that he was hers. He wanted to force her to tell him how strong Beauty's care was for her Beast of a husband, but restrained himself, unwilling to destroy the fragility of their new accord.
Instead he contented himself with answering her question, telling her something very few people knew. Her unhidden expression of care deserved to be rewarded with honesty. "Actually, I did get them for being a fast runner." He made a wry face. "When I was about seven, they were desperate for money. So they sold me."
Eight
Hira jerked up into a sitting position, holding the sheet to her breast. "People cannot be sold! Not in my country and not in yours."
He ran a hand up her arm, undone by her distress. "It wasn't so bad. You can imagine the kinds of things a depraved mind could do to a child."
She nodded, her face lined with worry. "I know." His protective instincts urged him to change that look, to take the pain away from her. "Well, nothing like that happened to me. The reason Muddy offered money for me was that I could run like the wind. Thieves need to be quick on their feet."
Her eyes were huge and round in the early morning light, "You were sold to a thief?"
"An old thief. He couldn't pick pockets himself anymore but he took me to New Orleans and trained me to do it. We preyed mainly on tourists who wandered off the beaten path in the French Quarter. I was with him for two years and most of these scars come from that work. Not all. Some are actually courtesy of my parents and Muddy's fists, but the really bad ones are from running the streets."
He ran his hand over one ragged line that ran diagonally from his left clavicle to the middle of his ribs on his right side. "I got slashed by a knife once when Muddy sent me into someone else's patch—territory," he explained, rubbing his hand along the white lines on his face.
"As for these, a gang took offence at my being in their territory, and I had a bottle broken across my face. Both times I got sliced up pretty bad but the wounds didn't require stitches, which is why the scars are so ugly. No surgeon to make them pretty."
She laid her hand over his, lips pressed tight. "They are not ugly. I have told you so."
He turned his palm up and captured her hand, something primitive in him appeased by her lack of resistance.
"Not exactly an honorable warrior's marks." His mouth twisted. "But I was a damn good thief."
Her hand squeezed his, her bones fine but strong in a very feminine way. "They are. How else could you have survived such a life without letting it destroy you, if you didn't have the soul of a warrior?"
He looked up into that intent, loyal face and found himself believing her. "You're far too innocent for the likes of me. But I'm keeping you." That primitive part of him rose to the surface, hotly possessive.
Her smile was pure sunshine, calming the primitive.
"You are welcome, husband mine. What happened after two years with the old thief?"
"I was in a really bad street fight. Muddy sent me somewhere he never should have—into drug territory. Anyway, I got opened up pretty bad." The memories were hazy because of the blood loss he'd suffered. "Muddy disappeared, never to be heard from again. I don't know if the drug lords got him or he just escaped when I was wheeled into intensive care. A couple of cops found me lying half-dead on the street."
"But you survived." Her fingers traced the fine white lines of scars across his abdomen.
"Yes. The doctors did a good job—those scars are the least visible."
"And yet there are so many. You were not just cut once." There was such anger in her eyes. "What happened after you recovered?"
"When the cops asked me how I'd ended up in the city, I lied and said I'd run away. So they returned me to my parents, instead of sending me to a foster home."
Hira frowned. "Why did you wish to return to your parents? They may have tried to sell you again."
"I knew they wouldn't, because I'd become their meal ticket."
"You stole for them?" There was no disapproval in her tone, as if she respected what the boy he'd been had done to survive.
Another sliver of his heart fell into her careful hands without his conscious volition. He just knew it was forever gone. Forever hers.
It was an effort to speak without demanding she give him something to replace what he'd just lost. "No. I stopped stealing as soon as I left Muddy. I got work, any work, and I gave them enough to keep them happy. That's why I went back. I knew that as long as they were boozed, they wouldn't care what I was up to, whereas a foster parent might've actually made an effort to discipline me."
Hira lay back down beside him on her side, propping her head up with one arm, her other hand still intertwined with his. "What were you doing that you didn't wish for discipline?"
"I had plans. I decided in the hospital that I'd never again be anyone's whipping boy." Even now he could feel that savagely beaten boy's grim determination. "That meant I had to have money, and to do that, I needed to work. My parents didn't care that I was working far too many hours for a kid, working late into the night in factories where the managers ignored my age.
"It took a few more kicks before I got my head screwed on perfectly straight, but once I did, that was it." One of those kicks had been delivered by Lydia Barnsworthy. "I was young but determined. By the time I'd graduated high school, I'd saved over thirty thousand dollars from working and then investing that money. I went to college on a baseball scholarship. Even though I'd worked on instinct in investing, I knew that some of the men I'd be dealing with in the future would be impressed by a degree."
Hira began to nod, her midnight-and-gold hair sliding across her bare shoulders. "You started your business with the money you made from your investing."
"Yes, with a little help from the bank. The first company I bought was a dying little family outfit that produced these unique toys. I busted my gut with it and sold it when I finished college for a profit that was big enough to allow me to buy my next company. Within five years of graduation, I was a multimillionaire."
"And you did it by saving dying companies, not looting them," she murmured. "A harder road."
He shrugged, uncomfortable with the veiled praise. "It's the way I like to work." Not by ripping apart but by slowly, painstakingly, gluing a fractured masterpiece together. He'd spent too many years with people who'd tried to destroy him. He couldn't do that to anyone or anything else.
"You were a very determined boy." The admiration in those mountain-cat eyes didn't dim. "How did you get involved with the orphanage?"
He found himself wanting to tell her, when he'd kept his secrets from everyone else. "I met Father Thomas about a year after I returned to my parents. He gave me a steady job cleaning the church after school. He also gave me...hope." He'd taken a beat-up, hard-as-nails kid and taught him the value of compassion and integrity.
"Later, when I needed to borrow money from the bank to finance that first business, he guaranteed my loan. I tried to pay him back with shares in my next company, but he said that he wouldn't take money from one of his sons." Being called "son" by Father Thomas meant far more to Marc .than any biological relationship.