Wickedly Dangerous (Baba Yaga, #1)(28)
A red flush spread across Baba’s high cheekbones and her nostrils flared. “Are you serious? First the woman tries to kill me, and then she sics the law on me?” Her accent grew markedly stronger as her voice rose, and she added a few words in Russian that Liam didn’t need a translator to know were probably extremely rude.
Liam stared at her. “Do you know your eyes are glowing?” he asked in a level tone. It must have been a trick of the light, but it was a little freaky. And what was that “tried to kill me” comment all about? They were clearly back to odd, mysterious, and infuriating. Or at the moment, infuriated.
Baba made an obvious effort to calm down, breathing in and out through her nose a few times and clenching and unclenching her hands.
“Sorry. I need to work on my temper.”
“You need to stay out of these people’s way,” he said flatly. “They’re very powerful around here.”
Baba gave him an assessing look, her amber eyes back to their normal piercing stare. It made him feel a little like a bug under a microscope.
“The charming Maya told me that her boss owns the people who run the town—is that true?”
Somehow he thought there was a question there she wasn’t asking out loud.
He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. They certainly seem to have a lot of influence these days. I just try to do my job and stay out of the politics. At the moment, I seem to be succeeding.” He volleyed the hairy eyeball back in her direction. “By the way, do you realize you’re bleeding all over your fancy rug? You should have told me you were seriously hurt. Let me take you to the hospital.”
“Pah,” she said, curling her lip in a way he found perversely adorable. “It’s not that bad. I’m a fast healer.”
Liam sighed. He didn’t know for sure who Barbara Yager was, but one thing was certain: she was the most stubborn woman he’d ever met.
“Fine. Tell me where you keep your first aid kit and I’ll patch you up myself.”
She gave him a blank look.
“Right. Of course you don’t have a first aid kit. You probably just put herbs on whatever cuts and burns you get.” He sighed again. “Why don’t you get out of those torn leathers and into a tee shirt and a pair of shorts, and get me a bowl of warm water and a clean cloth. I’ll go fetch my kit from the car.”
He was almost out the door when she said, “Lavender and aloe for the burns. Maybe honey, depending on the cut. It’s antibacterial, you know.”
Great. Now he had a mental image of her smeared with honey. He was never going to be able to use the stuff on his toast again.
*
WHEN HE CAME back in, Baba was sitting on the couch, her bad leg up on the dog’s furry back and a bottle of beer in her right hand. The tank top and shorts she wore did a nice job of exposing the extent of the road rash on her left side, and Liam hissed through his teeth in sympathy at the sight.
“That’s got to smart,” he said, trying not to stare at her long, slim thighs. The bright red blood dripping from her left knee proved to be distracting enough. “Are you sure you don’t want me to take you to the emergency room?”
Baba shook her head. “Machines instead of medicine; no thank you. I told you—I’m a fast healer. A couple of these,” she lifted her beer, “and a good night’s sleep, and I’ll be fine.”
“Right. I don’t think so.” He found a silver bowl and a linen cloth where she’d placed them on the counter, and winced at putting them to such rough usage. Who kept silver bowls in an RV, anyway? Apparently the woman who was currently oozing blood all over a velvet-covered sofa without a qualm.
He placed the bowl and his first aid kit on the coffee table and got to work, perched next to Baba on the edge of the couch. The scrape along her jaw looked raw and sore, and he had to fight the temptation to kiss it and make it better, settling for a little antibiotic ointment instead. He tried to be as gentle as possible, but the knee and elbow were both full of gravel that had to be cleaned out before he could bandage them. Baba’s face was white and set; she looked like some classical European statue of a goddess. If the goddess was covered with bruises and had black tar and grit ground into her skin.
“It’s a good thing you wear leathers,” Liam said as he picked out a couple of deeply embedded bits of stone with a pair of tweezers that looked tiny in his big hands. “This could have been a lot worse.” He blotted away a fresh upwelling of blood and winced. “Not that it isn’t bad enough. I’m sorry if I’m hurting you.”
Baba shrugged, although he noticed she took a long pull on her beer before saying, “My adoptive mother had a saying about such things.” She rattled off a couple of sentences in Russian that sounded like a coffee grinder running in reverse. “It means, roughly, pain is mostly mind over matter: if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
A chuckle escaped. “My old football coach had pretty much the same saying, only he usually made you do fifty push-ups after he said it.”
They both laughed, and Liam could feel a little of the accumulated tension slip away from his shoulders. After patting the knee dry, he dabbed some antibiotic ointment on it and started carefully wrapping a sterile dressing around the joint. Now that the worst part of the job was over, he tried not to look longingly at the beer dangling loosely from Baba’s long-fingered hand.