Free The Price of Scandal by Kim Lawrence

that made it all right, she thought, watching as he grabbed a clean tea towel and wrapped the chequered fabric tightly around the injured area.
    Her own hand trembled as she pushed a skein of fiery hair back from her brow. ‘And let me guess—it doesn’t hurt at all?’ She narrowed her eyes and thought, God save me from stupid macho men!
    The macho man in question maintained a stubborn silence as he added another tea towel to the makeshift dressing. Blood was already oozing through the first one; Neve had to look away from the red stain.
    Looking at the raised welts that stood out livid on the smooth skin of his brown back made her feel just as bad. She pressed a hand to her stomach where her muscles quivered in sympathetic reaction to his pain.
    ‘What happened? How did you do this?’
    ‘I was on a roof when it collapsed.’
    The casual explanation sent a chill through Neve. ‘You could have been killed!’
    ‘As you see, I wasn’t.’ The fact that she was becoming visibly agitated over something that had not happened baffled him.
    His offhand manner made Neve, who was struggling to banish the image of his broken, lifeless body from her head, see red. ‘What on earth,’ she yelled, ‘were you doing on a roof?’
    Wasn’t a blizzard challenge enough for this man? Did he have to go out looking for alternative ways to kill himself?
    ‘There must be a first-aid kit here somewhere…’ she muttered, opening a cupboard door and scanning the neatly arranged contents.
    ‘I was finding the high ground and making the phone call that I invented.’
    The explanation stopped Neve in her tracks. ‘Oh!’ She swallowed and gave a shamefaced grimace as she closed the door and straightened up empty-handed.
    Feeling several kinds of a fool, she glanced warily up at his lean face. ‘I suppose I owe you an apology.’
    ‘I suppose so too.’
    If she had hoped to see some thawing in his manner, Neve was disappointed. ‘I’m sorry about what I said…I suppose I was a bit…’
    He angled a sardonic brow and watched the colour in her cheeks deepen.
    ‘Paranoid?’ she suggested.
    ‘Yes, you were.’ He left his task long enough to sling her a curious look from under the sweep of his ridiculously long lashes. ‘Are you always this freakishly obsessive when you get an idea in your head?’
    Under the circumstances she could hardly take offence at the question, and she had in her life been accused of tunnel vision. ‘Hannah’s my responsibility.’
    ‘You asked your stepdaughter to steal a car and run away?’
    ‘No, of course not.’
    He arched an eloquent brow.
    ‘But I’m the adult.’
    ‘I doubt if that would make a difference.’ His assessing glance moved across her face. ‘I can see you at two, beating yourself up when your teddy bear lost an ear and feeling responsible when your best friend fell over and cut her knee.’
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She stopped, an arrested expression spreading slowly across her face as she realised there was more than a grain of truth in his comments.
    Hadn’t she always been the responsible one, first trying to keep Charlie out of trouble, and herself out of the care system? And now there was Hannah.
    ‘You have to take responsibility for your own actions,’ she asserted stubbornly.
    Neve had been doing that since she was fourteen.
    The year her parents had been killed in the train crash.
    Officially Charlie had been her guardian after their parents’ deaths, but Charlie’s ideas of guardianship had not been strictly conventional.
    Charlie would vanish for weeks at a time, often after saying he was just popping to the shop for a loaf of bread. It had made her self-reliant and also a pretty good liar!
    She’d had no choice. If the authorities had suspected she was living alone for weeks and sometimes months at a stretch they would have swooped, and being taken into care was one of Neve’s nightmares.
    It was her own teenage years that had made her empathise with