‘I’m sorry,’ she said thickly, avoiding his eyes, ‘I don’t know what came over me.’
He took her by the hand and led her over to a chair, pushing her down gently. He reappeared with a tissue, and another shot of alcohol in a glass. He crouched down before her and made her take a sip of the drink, until gradually she felt seminormal again.
He dipped another tissue in a glass of water and gently rubbed at her cheeks.
She was mortified at the emotional storm she’d just unleashed all over him—and at the way he was tending to her so easily.
When he’d put the tissue down she forced herself to look up from his damp shirt to his face, which was tense and unreadable. ‘Your shirt is ruined.’
His mouth tightened. ‘I couldn’t care less about my shirt. In fact—’ He broke off and stood up, starting to undo his buttons.
Kat’s mouth opened as his impressive chest was revealed, bit by bit. ‘What are you doing?’ she squeaked, holding the glass to her like some sort of shield.
Zafir’s shirt was open now, and he made short work of the cufflinks, throwing them on a nearby table before he let the shirt drop to the ground and then he knelt down in front of her again.
His naked and very masculine chest filled her vision. It was deliciously broad, with dark hair dusting defined muscles. And dark, flat nipples that she remembered were sensitive to the touch, earning her a hiss through his teeth whenever she’d lavished attention on them...
She felt bewildered and exposed. ‘Zafir—’
‘I want to see it, Kat. Show me your leg.’
Her insides clenched hard in rejection of that. But he looked determined. ‘Why would you want to see it?’
* * *
Zafir couldn’t exactly articulate why he needed to see Kat’s leg, but it came from a visceral place deep within him that was boiling over with a mixture of volatile emotions. Reverberating shock, futile anger, and a kind of grief he’d only ever felt before for his sister.
‘I want to see what happened to you.’
He could see the myriad expressions crossing her face, dominated by clear reluctance, and it made him want to go out and smash whoever had done this to her into tiny pieces. But then something else crossed her face that he couldn’t decipher—something like resignation—and she put her hands on her dress, pulling it up over her knees.
The sparkling folds of the dress were gathered on her smooth thighs and he could see now where thick material like a sock came halfway up the thigh of her left leg. It was flesh-coloured. So it wouldn’t be too noticeable? That sent another spurt of raw emotion through Zafir.
He moved back to give Kat room, watching as she pressed a button at the bottom of the prosthetic limb and then she pushed at it firmly, so that the whole apparatus slid down and off.
He absorbed fresh shock seeing her amputated leg, which now ended just a few inches below her knee. The thick, sock-like liner stretched from above her knee, to the bottom of her limb, where it was rounded and had a pin, which obviously slotted into the prosthetic leg to help keep it in place.
Her hands moved to the liner covering her leg and he could see that they were trembling. He moved forward and covered her hands, forcing her to meet his gaze by sheer will.
When she eventually looked at him he said, ‘Let me?’
She bit her lip, and it looked so painful that Zafir wanted to reach out and rescue it, but then she said hoarsely, ‘You don’t have to do this.’
He reminded her, with an arrogance that felt hollow now, ‘I don’t have to do anything.’ There was a heavy weight in his chest, an ache he’d never felt before.
Eventually she lifted her hands from under his and Zafir looked down and took a breath before carefully rolling the liner down Kat’s thigh, over her knee and off, taking in the enormity of the moment as her naked leg was revealed.
He put both hands on her leg, cupping it, feeling the skin where it was so brutally cut short. The scar was a jagged but neat line, and he ached even harder to imagine the pain she must have gone through. The weeks and months of rehabilitation. The fact that he hadn’t noticed anything before now was testament to her sheer will.
The earth could have stopped revolving outside, he was so focused on Kat and this moment. He looked at her. ‘Tell me what happened?’
Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap, knuckles white. Her face was pale, eyes huge. ‘It was dark. I was crossing a road... There was a truck and a motorcycle. They told me afterwards that the truck’s brakes failed and it went out of control, hitting the motorcycle. I ended up in the middle. My foot...was crushed.’
Zafir thought of her broken, lying still on the road, and felt a dizzying surge of panic. It took him a moment to compose himself, but then he said, ‘I’m so sorry, Kat...that this happened to you.’
She half shrugged, as if it was no big deal, but he could see the vulnerability in her eyes.
‘The man on the motorcycle died, Zafir. He was only twenty-two. When you consider that...I was lucky.’