CHAPTER 13 Kimberly
Kimberly
You can lie to the world about who you hate, but you cannot unlive the moment they accidentally feel like sanctuary.
I sneezed twice before we even reached the end of the block.
Jackson didn’t say a word, but he glanced at me from the driver’s seat with a slow, heavy twist of his head. The look was so loaded with a righteous, I told you so that I glared at his profile hard enough to practically crack the safety glass of the windshield.
"Don’t," I rasped, my throat already feeling like it had been scrubbed with coarse sandpaper. "Do not say it."
"I haven’t uttered a single syllable, Ms. Bishop."
"You were projecting it. Very loudly."
I sneezed a third time, a violent, full-body shudder that made my eyes water and my skull throb.
I was a pathetic, shivering disaster. Rain was still dripping from my clothes, and I knew for a fact the premium leather seat beneath me was going to require industrial restoration.
It swallowed me. The cuffs buried my hands, and the collar came up past my chin.
Without breaking his gaze from the road, Jackson reached blindly into the back seat, snagged a heavy bundle, and dropped it straight into my lap.
It was his coat. A tailored charcoal-wool piece, the lining still holding the shape of his shoulders, heavy and still warm with his body heat. I stared down at it as if he’d handed me a live mortar shell.
"Put it on," he said, his eyes fixed on the rain-slicked pavement. "Before you permanently compromise my upholstery with advanced hypothermia."
I didn’t argue. I wrapped it around my shoulders.
It was utterly massive on my frame, the structured shoulders halfway down my arms, the wool impossibly warm.
The cedar I usually caught in passing off him was wrapped all the way around me now, and I wasn't going to think about it. I pulled the heavy wool tighter around my chest and held my tongue, because a proper thank you would have required an amount of emotional vulnerability that I was entirely unprepared to offer a man I’d been screaming at in a sandbox forty minutes ago.
Then, the audio system engaged.
It had been dead silent when we started the engine, but somewhere along the bridge, he reached down and turned a dial. What filtered through the speakers made me question every metric I'd used to judge him.
It wasn’t a financial podcast. It wasn't a classical symphony. It was an agonizingly raw blues-soul track. Old blues. A piano and a voice that sounded wrecked, singing about wanting someone it shouldn't. Too raw for a six-figure car driven by a man who fired people before breakfast.
The ice prince listened to aching love songs.
I side-eyed him, my chin tucked deep into his collar. "Are you seriously going to pretend that isn’t playing right now?"
"The vehicle came equipped with a factory radio, Ms. Bishop."
"Oh, naturally." I adjusted the wool over my shivering arms. "I just never envisioned the man who uses a digital thermometer to verify the temperature of his espresso getting misty over a delta-blues ballad."
He didn’t take the bait. He kept both hands locked on the leather wheel. But as the streetlight swept across the interior, I caught the corner of his mouth twitching.
"I meant the apology," he said. It was lower this time, aimed directly at the dashboard. "The package. I genuinely didn’t know what was inside it."
"Knowing wouldn’t have shifted the baseline, Jackson," I murmured, my voice softening against my will. "You still would have found a way to remind me of the boundary lines."
He didn’t push back. He just drove. And as the rain hammered the roof and the heavy piano chords filled the cabin, the suffocating hostility between us slowly melted into a tense, vibrating truce.
By the time the tires crunched through the security gates of the estate, I was almost sorry the ride was over.
Saturday morning, I was completely incapacitated.
It wasn’t a standard cold. It was a full-scale, scorched-earth biological mutiny.
My throat felt like it was lined with broken glass, my skull was a vice, and every time I tried standing, the bedroom spun like a ship caught in a Category 5 hurricane.
I managed to drag myself halfway down the east wing corridor before my knees literally informed me they were resigning from service.
I braced my palms against the wainscoting, slid down to the floor, and eventually crawled back into bed, pulling the duvet entirely over my eyes.
The heavy oak door clicked open twenty minutes later.
"Hospital," a voice clipped from the threshold.
I pulled the covers down just far enough to glare at him through one bloodshot eye. Jackson was standing there in a pristine charcoal suit, looking completely untouched by the universe, while I felt like a swamp creature.
"No," I croaked.
"Your color is terrible and you’re visibly vibrating. You have a fever."
"I have an acute rhinovirus. Human beings have survived them for centuries without clinical intervention."
"You stood in a downpour for two hours because you wanted to make a point," he said, stepping into the room with his arms crossed. "This isn’t a virus, Ms. Bishop. It’s a direct consequence."
"I am not going to a hospital," I snapped, the effort causing me to hack violently into my pillow.
"I live in hospitals, Jackson. I spend half my week sitting in sterile oncology units watching my sister get pumped full of toxic chemicals.
I am not checking into one for myself just because I got caught in the rain.
" I yanked the blanket back over my head.
"Go away. I’ll be functional by tomorrow. "
I was not functional by tomorrow. Or the day after.
The fever spiked brutally, plunging me into a horrific forty-eight-hour cycle of drenching sweats and violent chills while the gray Seattle sky kept unloading outside.
But the true, hallucinatory shock of the illness didn’t come from the fever.
It came from the fact that Jackson Whitlock kept showing up in my room.
On Sunday morning, the door opened to reveal him carrying a heavy silver tray.
There was a ceramic bowl of actual, homemade chicken broth—thick with fresh dill and root vegetables—a neatly folded linen napkin, and a steaming amber glass that smelled intensely of crushed ginger, raw honey, and fresh lemon.
I peered out from my nest of blankets, thoroughly bewildered. "Did you hire a private chef over the weekend?"
"Hollis is off on Sundays," Jackson said, setting the tray down on my nightstand with precise care. "The ginger remedy is an old formulation my mother used to prepare. The broth is from a standard recipe located in the kitchen archive."
"You… cooked this?"
"I am a grown man who resides in a massive estate," he said. "I either possess basic culinary competence or I succumb to malnutrition. I selected the option that didn’t compromise my daily capacity. Eat."
I pushed myself up against the headboard, my muscles aching, and took a tentative sip of the ginger remedy. The heat hit my throat like a wave of pure mercy, sweet and sharp, spreading warmth into my lungs.
I looked at him over the rim of the glass, my eyes tracking the sharp, clean line of his jaw. "Is this a strategy to make yourself feel less guilty for my death?"
"Didn’t you explicitly inform me that you had no intention of granting me forgiveness?
" He leaned his shoulder against the heavy wood of the doorframe, his gray eyes fixed on me with a strange, unblinking intensity. "I am simply ensuring a highly critical residential asset doesn’t permanently depreciate due to a preventable medical crisis. It’s basic risk management. "
"You’re nursing me as a business decision."
"Every calculation in this house is a business decision, Ms. Bishop. Some of them simply require fresh ginger."
A small, breathless laugh escaped my lips before I could lock it down. Jackson’s eyes tracked the movement instantly, his gaze dropping to the slight curve of my mouth, and then he looked away, excusing himself.
He returned later that evening to check up on me. I was propped up against a mountain of pillows, wrapped in three separate wool blankets, trying to focus on one of Greta’s old leather-bound novels.
Without asking for permission, Jackson walked straight to the side of the bed, reached down, and firmly pressed the back of his bare hand against my forehead.
His hand was cool and dry against my skin. Neither of us moved. His eyes locked entirely onto mine in the dim, amber glow of the bedside lamp and the sudden, violent flush of heat that rushed to my face had absolutely nothing to do with my white blood cell count.
"You're still burning," he said, his voice dropping low and rough. My pulse spiked against my ribs.
"I’m… fine," I lied, my voice barely a whisper.
His hand didn’t drop. Instead, his thumb brushed my temple. Our gazes stayed locked, and for one terrifying moment, I thought he was going to lean down. I thought he was going to bridge the remaining six inches of space and put his mouth against mine.
How badly I wanted him to terrified me. I flinched into the pillows.
"I’m thoroughly certain of my own temperature," I stammered, frantically pulling the duvet up to my chin like a shield. "Thank you for the broth earlier."
Jackson let his hand drop slowly back to his side, his fingers curling into his palm as if he were catching a wire. He stared at me for one more long, unreadable second, then turned on his heel and disappeared into the corridor.
I lay there in the dark for two hours, my palm pressed tightly over the exact spot on my forehead where his skin had touched mine, telling myself it was the fever.
It was definitely the fever. I was the responsible sister.
The pragmatic one. The one who didn’t develop highly inconvenient, full-body physical reactions to the touch of a tyrannical tech executive who had actively tried to evict her from the planet.
By Thursday, I was finally functional.