“Why on earth wouldn’t you take pain medicine?”

A low growl. “If you don’t give it to me, I’m going downstairs myself.”

“Do you just want me to feel guilty?” I say, throwing up my hands. Tears prick my eyes. I hate being emotional at a time like this. I can’t seem to stop.

“Guilty? Why would you feel guilty?”

“I know what happened out there. You pushed me back onto the ground and let yourself fall instead. The only reason you have three broken bones is because of me.”

“God save me from crying females. It’s not your fault. It’s not Paige’s fault. It’s not anybody’s fault but this damn cliff and the ocean and a thousand years of history.”

“I’m going to stand here crying until you take the pain meds.” It’s not hard to make that threat, because I’m already standing here crying. When I was sixteen I talked back to my foster mother. She held my wrist so hard and twisted that it fractured. I didn’t cry the whole time she did it. I didn’t cry that night when I went to bed or in the morning when the school nurse realized what happened and sent me to the hospital. Now I’m a watering pot. It doesn’t make any sense.

“Christ.” He takes the two pills sitting on the nightstand and swallows them dry.

A hard sniffle is my attempt to stop crying. “I could drink the whiskey for you.”

“Get out.”

He continues to be a terrible patient, arguing every time he needs medicine, growling because he’s clearly in pain, demanding whiskey along with brandy and finally tequila.

Mrs. Fairfax bustles in to clean his room and the rest of the house. She leaves promptly at noon, the same way she does every day. “I don’t take care of invalids,” she says on her way out the door. “Don’t get paid to do that.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Beau Rochester

God save me from crying females.

Jane with her gorgeous wide doe eyes. I can’t believe how close she came to going over the side of that cliff. My body is made of salt and water, made to beat against these Maine rocks. She’s fragile. Slender. Young. The fall could have killed her.

My mind supplies that image for me. Every time I close my eyes, it’s not my own fall that I see. It’s hers. She could have gone over the cliff—and then what?

It would have broken me to see her hurt, or worse, killed.

I’ve gone far too deep with this girl. The sex was wrong. Inappropriate. Definitely taboo to ever touch the nanny, but it was only supposed to be sex. An approximation of sex. Touching and kissing. Fucking her mouth. Does that count as sex?

Now I’m feeling things for her I have no business feeling.