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“I was washing your blood off me.”

“Yes.” His voice had gone strange. “I see that.”

He was not looking away.

I want to be very clear about what I did next, because I have thought about it a great deal since. I did not cover myself. I did not drop down into the water or snatch at the linen on the rock. I stood in that pool with the cold running off me and let the Sheriff of Nottingham look. Watched him take in my wet body.

And God help me, it was the most satisfying thing that had ever happened to me.

The thought of being watched by him, really watched, with nothing between us but air and water, sent a sharp pulse straight to my clit. It throbbed, hard and insistent, and the heat that had been circling me all morning suddenly had teeth. My nipples ached, tight and flushed, and I knew it was not the temperature. It was him. It had been far too long, and the knowledge that he could see every inch of me, that he was standing there taking it in while the cold water lapped at my thighs, made something low and filthy uncoil inside me.

I let my hand drift down. Slowly.

Under the surface. My fingers found the place that had been aching since before dawn, and I pressed, once, then again, circling the swollen bud of my clit while I held his gaze. The water hid the motion, but I knew he could see the way my arm moved, the subtle shift of my shoulder, the way my breath hitched. Heat flared hot and wet between my legs, and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound.

He had gone absolutely still. The hand on the birch had closed hard enough to pale the knuckles, his jaw had set in a way I had only seen once before in that cabin, and his chest was moving like a man who had run the hill rather than limped down it. He looked at me the way a starving man looks through a window at a table, and then I watched him make himself stop.

He turned his head. Deliberately, by force, the way you pull a dog off a scent, and he fixed his eyes on the trees.

“Forgive me,” he said, low.

“Why?”

“Robin.”

“It’s a reasonable question.” I pushed my wet locs back over my shoulder, the motion deliberate, letting the water run down between my breasts. My fingers stayed where they were beneath the surface, working slow circles over my clit. The throb was almost painful now, the heat rising in a slow, heavy wave that had nothing to do with the spring and everything to do with the Alpha twenty paces away who refused to keep looking. “You walked down here because I’d been gone too long and you thought something had happened to me. You found me in a pool. What exactly am I meant to be forgiving?”

He did not answer that for a moment.

“I am trying very hard,” he said, “to be a decent man this morning.”

“How’s that going?”

“Poorly.”

I laughed and it came up out of me loud and bright and rang off the rocks.

I saw his shoulders move with it even facing away. The sound vibrated through me, and my fingers pressed harder. I was wet, slicker than the water around me, and the knowledge that he was standing there, forcing himself not to watch while I touched myself under his scent and his silence, made the next stroke feel almost like relief.

“The water’s freezing, Sheriff.”

“I’d imagine.”

“You could come in.”

“I could also tear open my stitches, drown, and be found by your Merry Men without my trousers.” He shook his head slowly at the trees. “Nottingham would never recover.”

“It might improve its opinion of you.”

“Little Ghost.”

“Yes?”

“Finish bathing.”

What he did then is the part I keep coming back to.

He didn’t leave. He turned his back fully, folded his arms, and planted himself at the top of that path with his eyes on the forest, and he stayed there while I washed, guarding the only approach to the water with a knife wound in his side and his head turned away like a man standing a watch.