“—would be no more than you deserve if I just let you bleed to death— What are you smiling about?” Cara demanded, a dark scowl low on her brow as she applied fresh gauze to Adam’s wounds, front and back.
He’d tried to hold back the humor, he really had, but he couldn’t prevent the burst of laughter that escaped him now just from seeing the exasperation in Cara’s expression.
As expected, she’d gone verbally ballistic on him after Malachi had released the two women from the safe room and Cara had come straight upstairs to Adam’s bedroom to check on him. Her language, when she saw him sitting on the side of the bed, the blood-soaked T-shirt he’d managed to remove still in his hand and revealing the equally bloody bandage beneath he hadn’t been able to take off yet, had turned the air blue for the long seconds it took her to unfasten and remove the soiled bandage.
There were several words she’d used then that Adam wasn’t sure he’d ever heard before, and he’d been in the military.
“If you don’t wipe that grin off your face, I’m going to totally lose it,” she warned through gritted teeth.
Adam hissed as she wrapped a new bandage around his torso a little tighter than he thought was necessary. “I thought you’d already done that when you called me, and I quote, ‘a stupid, arrogant, pigheaded, moron of a fucking man’?” And that had been the milder of her name-calling.
“I haven’t even started yet,” she assured aggressively. “It’s pure luck you didn’t burst any of the stitches open. I’m sure your doctor would have just loved being called out to attend to you again at three o’clock in the morning.”
Adam shrugged. “He’s paid enough as a retainer not to question the time or reason for the injuries we occasionally need him to deal with.”
“Malachi said something similar earlier,” she dismissed disgustedly. “Surely the doctor realizes this, at least, is a gunshot wound?”
“Of course he realizes.”
“Shouldn’t he report it to the police?”
“It’s a very big retainer.”
Cara gave a shake of her head. “I don’t think I want to know what sort of injuries you Kingston men have had in the past that the doctor treated the fact you’ve obviously been shot as if he was just making an ordinary house call.” She stood back to look at her handiwork. “I don’t think we’re going to need to call him again tonight, at least. The stitches were still in place, and the bleeding seems to have stopped for now too.”
And although he didn’t want to admit it, Adam was ready to just fall back on the bed and pass out. Going downstairs earlier and out into the grounds had exhausted him, but reversing that sequence had almost brought him to his knees. In fact, he thought he might have actually crawled the last few feet to his bedroom and then pulled himself up by the duvet until he was actually sitting on the side of the bed.
Only seconds later, Cara had burst into the room and launched into her attack concerning the depth of his stupidity, amongst other things. He thought there might have been a couple of references in there regarding his legitimacy too.
“Adam?”
“Hm?” Why was Cara swaying, and in such a way he was finding it impossible to focus on her, even when he opened his eyes really wide?
“Adam, are you about to—”
He didn’t hear any more because his eyes rolled back in his head and the world went black.
Cara moved quickly to kneel on the bed and press her fingers on Adam’s neck to make sure he was still alive. His pulse was steady and strong, which meant he’d probably just passed out from overexerting himself so soon after being shot.
Pigheaded, impossible, reckless bloody man.
Name-calling wasn’t going to change the fact that Adam was lying prone on top of the duvet. Well, the top half of him was. His legs were still bent at the knees with the lower half of his legs dangling over the side of the bed and his feet on the floor.
His face had become a sickly gray, his cheeks and eyes slightly sunken. Even the skin of his tattooed chest looked paler than usual above the clean white bandage.
He was also still very much unconscious. Which was probably a good thing, as his jeans needed to come off, a move which would no doubt cause him more discomfort.
Maybe she could go and look for one of his cousins to help her?
That would be the sensible thing to do.
The right thing to do.
Except Cara was loath to let anyone else so much as touch Adam.
Since the moment she’d seen him sitting on the side of the bed, swaying slightly from having lost even more blood, she’d felt a proprietary claim on him she had no right to feel after the two of them had shared only a few kisses.
Right or not, she’d already refused Casper’s offer of help, as well as Max and Rosie’s. Malachi had appeared in the doorway once, taken one look at the fierceness of her challenging expression, and retreated again without saying a word.
No doubt Adam’s other cousins were still outside patrolling the grounds. Otherwise, they would no doubt have come to Adam’s bedroom by now to check on him too.
Malachi, when he’d released Cara and Rosie from the safe room, had assured them that although they had located where someone had obviously tried to get in and had set off the alarm, no one had actually managed to breach the outer wall and other security they had in place to keep out intruders.
A security system they’d apparently had to update after Rosie had managed to breach it the previous week when she came here wanting their help in finding Cara.
All of which was reassuring, but it wasn’t going to be of the least help to Cara in getting Adam undressed and into bed.
She managed to get off his boots without mishap but then felt self-conscious as she unbuttoned and then unzipped his jeans. She felt like a voyeur who was taking advantage of his nakedness when he was incapable of doing anything to stop her.
She paused to take a few fortifying breaths after she’d struggled for several minutes to roll Adam onto his side so she could pull the jeans down at the back. Only to gasp and raise a hand to her mouth when she saw the large tattoo on his back. Tears burned her eyes when she guessed the reason for it.
The tattoo itself was of a prowling tiger, and it was designed to conceal the burned flesh that covered over half of Adam’s broad back.
Evenly spaced burns that looked as if they had been deliberately inflicted rather than being the result of his having been caught in a fire.
“The Taliban captured and held him for several days eleven years ago, before Max and his team were able to locate and rescue him.” Sinclair spoke quietly from the doorway. “That’s some of their handiwork.”
Cara gave him a brief glance and then turned back to look at Adam, her fist still pressed against her lips. The stripes of the tiger had been deliberately tattooed on the even ridges of raised skin. The fierceness of the tiger’s face was increased by the two deep holes in the flesh where the tiger’s eyes should have been.
“They stuck a thin, hot rod of metal into him to make those holes,” Sinclair supplied. “They didn’t heal properly and left permanent scars.”
Cara felt sick as images of Adam being tortured swam inside her head and refused to be denied. She could see him, like a disturbing scene from a movie, strung up and bare from the waist up, with his feet only just touching the ground as he was deliberately and systematically burned and then a hot rod was stabbed into his flesh, not just once, but several times. She couldn’t even comprehend the pain he must have suffered through.
“He didn’t tell them anything,” Sinclair assured.
She turned her head sharply to glare at him. “I didn’t need you to tell me that.” She knew Adam well enough to realize he would have remained silent, no matter what those men did to him.
“Maybe not, but someone needs to tell you that it’s because of the torture and the scars, inside and out, that Adam keeps his distance from you,” Sinclair added softly.
She rocked back on her heels. “He said something similar earlier.” He’d called himself a thug, something Cara definitely hadn’t liked. “I don’t see him that way.”
“I know you don’t, but the thing is, he does.”
“Then he needs to be convinced otherwise.”
“By you?”
“Yes, by me,” she came back fiercely.
“Look, let’s get Adam undressed and comfortable in bed.” Sinclair strode across the bedroom. “After we’ve done that, we can go down to the kitchen, I’ll make some coffee, and we can drink it while the two of us have a chat. Understand, it will be nothing about Adam that you wouldn’t be able to find out for yourself, given more time.”
Cara nodded. “Fair enough.”
“I’ll ask Malachi to come and sit with Adam. Don’t be misled by appearances,” Sinclair assured when Cara gave him a frowning glance. “Malachi is the one person we’re all more than happy to have at our side when the shit hits the fan. His family loyalty is beyond question.”
“I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”
“You’re just worried about Adam.” Sinclair nodded in understanding and he took his cell phone from his jacket pocket, put it on speaker and made a call.
“Yo?”
“Could you come to Adam’s bedroom right away, please, Mal,” Sinclair requested.
“Be right there.” Malachi ended the conversation without asking why he was needed. It seemed to be enough that Sinclair was making the request.
Cara was reluctant to leave Adam’s side for any reason, as Sinclair had guessed might be the case, but she had a feeling, despite Sinclair’s warning, that anything the eldest Kingston brother had to tell her about Adam would give her a better understanding of him.
Before they went downstairs, Sinclair and Malachi made short work of stripping the rest of Adam’s clothes off. Cara turned away so as not to stare at Adam’s muscular and naked body when the two brothers lifted him so that his head rested on the pillows and then pulled up the duvet to cover him. Adam gave a couple of groans during his cousins’ manhandling of him as if it pained him, but he didn’t wake at all.
It would have taken Cara far longer to achieve that on her own. If she’d been successful in getting Adam undressed and into bed at all.