The Inner Beast

Cloella took the cup back from him with zero comprehension in her deep blue eyes. “Why must you feel pain?”

But the Hessian only narrowed his eyes at her; he didn’t want her pity, or her curiosity. “I assume you have a name.” His voice was still like a hissed growl, but then, he hadn’t spoken much in the last ten years. Conversation was something he had avoided; it just didn’t fit the beast image he worked so hard to maintain.

“It’s Cloella, but my family used to call me Chloie.” She was busy peeling back the rag that she’d told him to hold over his wound and smearing a poultice of sulfur and honey over the bullet holes. She couldn’t look in his eyes when her hands were on his chest. She preferred not to think about why while kneeling so close to him.

The touch of her soft fingertips made him gasp and jump again, but not because the area was sore and her touch had been too heavy as Cloella had thought. He fought the urge to lean into her stroking fingers, close his eyes and let his head drop back against the wall behind him. If only he’d been shot a few more times, or stabbed by bayonets, whatever it would have taken to produce more wounds that she would have to smear the poultice on, he never wanted her to stop touching him. Wait, what was he thinking? Damn it! What was wrong with him? He’d steeled himself against the thoughts and desires for a woman’s touch, or the feeling of their bodies against his a decade ago; he was disciplined, menacing, inhuman, and he wouldn’t let this slip of a girl change that. “They used to call you that?” He questioned upon collecting himself once more.

“Typhoid,” Cloella murmured. “It took them all and left me here.” With downcast eyes she wiped her sticky fingers on her apron, knowing not to expect the Hessian to say the words “I’m sorry” to her, and he didn’t. “So what is your name?”

“I have several, and you already know them all,” he said with a dangerous smile. “The Hessian, The Horseman, Teufel.”

“Teufel?”

“Devil, to you.”

Cloella’s face distorted in her disapproval. “No, I mean your Christian name, what is it?”

The Hessian laughed. “I have done away with that.”

She was persistent. “Nonetheless, you had one once, what was it?”

“I won’t tell you, ask me no more!” He growled at her, his eyes suddenly becoming unsettlingly cold and ugly.

Cloella sank closer to the floor; she hadn’t meant to make him angry, she knew already what he was capable of doing when he was vexed. She apologized, snatching a strip of muslin cloth from the table and hiding her shame by rolling the bandage meticulously into shape.

The Hessian sighed heavily, he hadn’t meant to frighten her, and then another wave of anger washed over him when he realized that he’d actually felt sorry for what he’d done. But, what was he do? Chop off his own head? What was the point in remaining so brutal in her presence? Tomorrow he would leave at first light, and he’d never see her again, so why exhaust himself with being so guarded?

“Heinrich.” He muttered.

Her head instantly sprang up and she looked at him with a smile. “Hein—“

His long finger was pressed to her lips before she could get the name through them. “Nein! Do not speak it! Never speak that name!” He wanted no reminders of his humanity; it would only serve to drag him down. He stared into her eyes, and she stared back into his, undaunted.

“Very well, Hessian!” Cloella said with annoyance showing in her tone, but she quickly swallowed it back, not wanting to see his eyes go so dreadfully harsh again. “May I ask you why you’ve done that to your teeth?”

“There was little else to be done while in Franzosisch prison,” he answered matter of factly, and that was partially true. The reality was that while he was a prisoner of the French, he swore he’d become something so terrifying that no one would ever dare to cross him again. And no one had, until now.

There was no use in inquiring about his prison stay, or the cause for it, Cloella knew. She figured she had better drop her questioning routine. “If you can lean forward, I can bandage your wound.”

It was with mixed feelings that the Hessian moved closer to the edge of the bed. She would have to touch him again, and he both welcomed and feared it; he didn’t like what it stirred in him, but then, couldn’t wait to feel those stirrings begin over again.
She rose up onto her knees, anchoring the first strip of muslin over the blotter piece that covered his wound with her hand and needed to take a deep breath to steady herself as she unrolled the bandage around his chest. The Hessian did close his eyes when her arm had to wrap around him in order to pass the roll of muslin across his strong back. Her warm soft breasts brushed his bare skin and he trembled; so did Cloella. She’d lost track of how many times she’d wrapped bandages around him, she only knew that her cheek sometimes touched his chest, and that his hot breath sometimes raced passed her neck. Her mind wandered drunkenly back to kissing him, for she had been kissing him, giving herself freely to him and enjoying it as he took what was offered. Her body tingled, quaked, burned; she wondered if he could tell. Good God, if he were to heave himself above her again as he had done before, she wouldn’t even attempt to escape him, not for a second. He needed her, she’d felt that from him in their kiss, but what astonished her was that she needed him too, just as badly.