She strangled on another hiccough and stopped crying long enough to ask, “Who?”
Malcolm wanted to touch the nape of her neck, but she wasn’t ready for that yet. “The bastard who hurt you.”
She finally rolled over to face him. Tear streaks blotched reddened cheeks. Faint surprise flickered in her eyes. For several moments, he thought she wasn’t going to answer. When she did, it still wasn’t really an answer.
”You sound angry.”
This time he did touch her, very gently. And this time, she didn’t flinch away. “I am angry, Margo. More than you can know”
She held his gaze for long seconds. Behind her, spring water poured over a lip of stone and meandered through Diana’s sacred grove down to the Tiber and the distant sea.
Then she turned away again. “You’re wrong. It wasn’t what you’re thinking. And I was wrong, too. About a lot of things.”
Malcolm bit one lip. God, who did this to her? I’ll take him apart … . “Maybe, but so was he. Whoever he was, whatever reason he had for doing it. He was wrong.”
”How-how can you be so-so damned nice?”
Meaning you only sleep with boys who are rotten to you?
He decided to introduce a little levity. “But I’m not nice. I’m a calculating cad, Miss Margo.” She went very still in his arms. “Consider: I dragged you two thousand years into the past, plied you with sweet Roman wine, then danced you through half the streets in the city for the express purpose of scaring myself half witless. We perverts are like that, you know. Devious fellows. We’ll do anything to indulge our bent for self-inflicted terror.”