Chapter 10: Healing

His tongue was cool, then warm, and the pain went out of my hands.

Under his mouth the raw red flesh closed.

It closed like a mouth healing over a word, pink and new and smooth, from the heel of my palm to my fingertips.

When he lifted his head my left hand was whole.

He started on the right.

"You should have let me burn," he said, to my fingers.

"I would have woken at dusk and been none the worse."

"You'd have been a puddle."

"I would have been ash."

"That is a small price for a woman's palms."

"I'm not paying it for you."

"I'm paying it for me."

He raised his head again.

His eyes were black and glittering and wet, and there was a smear of my blood at the corner of his mouth.

His whole body was shaking, hard, like a horse that has run itself to a standstill.

"You lay on top of me in the sun," he said.

"I could feel it when I woke, Ailsa."

"I could feel where you had been."

"A fool's trick."

"If they had not been stupid, you would have burned alive."

"Well, they were," I said.

"And I didn't."

"Do not do it again."

"Then don't sleep in a place where it's possible."

"There is no other place!"

"Then I'll sleep in front of the door," I said.

"I'll sit on your cellar step with a shotgun for the rest of my life."

"Don't you shout at me for saving you, Niall Kerr."

"I will not have it."

We glared at each other.

Then his mouth twitched, and mine did.

The next thing I knew we were both laughing, his forehead on my knee and my healed hands in his silver hair.

The laugh went on a long time.

When it stopped, it did not stop clean.

He lifted his face and looked up at me from the floor, and the look in his eyes was hungry and not about blood.

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