Chapter 8 #2
Before Evie can argue, and her mouth is already opening to do exactly that, I slide one arm behind her back and the other under her knees and lift her off the counter.
Her arm goes around my neck for balance.
Her hair brushes my jaw, lemon verbena hitting me from six inches away, close and mixed with her skin, and I don't adjust my grip even though there are more efficient ways to carry someone.
"Okay so apparently it's just ME who can't carry her," Darcy says from somewhere behind us.
"You have the upper body strength of a housecat, D." Evie's voice is dry, but her fingers have curled into the collar of my shirt and she hasn't let go.
The staircase to the second floor is fourteen steps. I've never counted them before. I count them now, each one a unit of time where she's against my chest with her heartbeat so close to mine that I can feel both, and hers is fast.
Fourteen steps. You could take them two at a time if you moved like a man carrying a patient instead of a man trying to make a staircase last forever.
I set her on the bed in the guest room and arrange the pillow under her ankle.
Standard elevation, calf supported, foot above heart level.
My hands are careful and professional and they do not linger on her leg when I position it.
My thumb traces the edge of the wrap one last time because the tension needs checking.
That's the reason. The skin just above it is smooth under my knuckle, and I pull my hand back before it becomes something else.
"Twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off with the ice." My voice is level, the one that briefs clients and debriefs teams and doesn't waver. "If the swelling hasn't gone down by morning, I'll wrap it again."
Evie nods. Her flush is fading. Her composure is returning in real time, layer by layer, and I recognize the reconstruction because I'm doing the same thing.
I walk down the hall to my bedroom without looking back.
From my window the Marina is dark and quiet, boat lights dotting the water, and the glass reflects my face back at me, a man who looks exactly like someone who has everything under control.
Her heartbeat against my chest on the stairs, fast and getting faster, and her fingers twisted in my collar like she was holding on to something she didn't want to let go of.
My mind builds the rest without permission.
What she'd look like if I put that flush there on purpose.
If my hands moved higher than medically justified and kept going, up her calf, behind her knee, along the inside of her thigh where the skin gets softer and warmer and she'd make that sound again, the quiet one, except it wouldn't be quiet because I wouldn't stop at a graze.
Her lips parting around my name before Darcy walked in, and what she would have said, and what I would have done if she'd said it.
My grip tightens on the windowsill and there's heat building low in my abdomen that has nothing to do with the ride home and everything to do with the woman who is currently lying twenty feet away on the other side of a wall that isn't thick enough.
She's your sister's best friend. She's sleeping in your house. She has a sprained ankle that you wrapped with your own hands and you're standing at your window thinking about her thighs.
Outstanding. Really outstanding work.
Putain. I press my forehead against the glass. It's cold, and I need it to be cold.
Darcy's voice fades into her room, then silence. Night fills the spaces between the walls, and I stand at my window building a patient file on the woman sleeping down the hall.
My hands are steady. They're always steady.
That's the worst part.
It's been two hours since Darcy's door clicked shut.
I know because I counted. Not consciously at first, not until I realize I've been tracking a heartbeat under my fingertips for minutes, but somewhere between staring at my ceiling and accepting that sleep wasn't coming, the counting became conscious. Became calculated.
Running surveillance on your sister's sleep schedule so you can stand in a hallway outside a closed door without a witness. Outstanding, Saint. Really stellar use of your training.
The fog horn sounds once, low and long, somewhere out past the Marina.
My feet are bare on the hardwood and the late-night silence turns every creak in the foundation into a confession.
Her door is twenty feet away. Closed. The light underneath is off, has been for over an hour, and I know that too because I was tracking it, automatically, without deciding to, like I would for any patient I was concerned about.
The lie almost holds.
You'd do it for any teammate. Sure. Name one time you stood outside Jax's door at midnight counting his breathing.
My hand finds the knob. The crystal is cool against my palm, and I stand there long enough to feel my own pulse in my fingertips because I know what this is.
This is a line. Not the blurry kind I can rationalize in the morning, not one that shifts depending on the angle, but the sharp, bright line that exists specifically so a man can see it before he crosses.
I open the door anyway.
The room smells like her lotion and the lemon verbena and something underneath both that's just her skin, warm from sleep.
Fog-filtered light comes through the window in a pale glow, enough to see shapes but not details, enough to find the bed and the curve of her body underneath the covers.
She's on her side, facing the door, right ankle propped on the blue pillow from the couch. Good. She listened.
I cross the room and drop into a crouch beside the bed, forearms on my knees. Tilt my head.
Her breathing is slow and even. Twelve breaths a minute, counted before I even entered. This close, I can feel each exhale against my forearm.
A strand of hair has fallen across her cheek. It lifts and settles with each breath, and I watch it for long enough that the watching becomes its own confession.
My hand moves before the excuse forms and my fingers brush the strand back from her face, tucking it behind her ear with a touch so light it barely qualifies as contact. Her skin is warm under my fingertip. Sleep-warm. She exhales against my knuckles, soft, and I can feel it all the way up my arm.
Her lips are parted, relaxed in a way I've never seen when she's awake, and what I'm actually doing is looking at her mouth, thinking about what it would feel like against mine. No amount of clinical vocabulary is going to reframe that into something professional.
Nobody sees her like this. It's not the camera-ready version, not the Blanchard smile. This is the version underneath both, and I want to keep it that way with a ferocity that should alarm me.
It does alarm me.
And yet you're still not leaving.
I pull my hand back and stand. The absence of her skin against my fingertip feels like a phantom limb, there and then gone, and my heart rate is doing something it has no right to do for a man who was only checking on a patient.
Her phone lights up on the nightstand, and I see the notification before it fades.
Blanchard's office. Eleven forty-seven at night.
I note it next to how her voice shifts when she takes his calls, next to the foundation donor list Cole pulled last week that I haven't opened because I don't want to know what I'll find.
You knelt beside her bed. You touched her face. She doesn't know you're here.
You know what that makes you.
Her skin is still on my hands. All of it.
Her calf under my knuckle in the kitchen, the curl of her toes against my palm, and now the softness behind her ear.
I've lost every medical justification I walked in with, and what's left is just a man in the dark who keeps finding reasons to touch a woman who doesn't know he's here.
Senior's face surfaces, unbidden. My grandfather in his study, choosing the family name over the truth, choosing legacy over his own dead son.
Different name, same sin.
She shifts. Not a startle, not waking, just the slow unconscious rearrangement of a body seeking comfort, and she moves closer to the edge of the mattress, toward me, her hand sliding across the empty space on the sheets like she's reaching for something that should be there.
Her hair falls across the pillow and the soft light spills across the loose waves she doesn't straighten when nobody's watching, the real ones, still carrying the faint sweetness of her conditioner.
I need to leave. Close this door and walk back to my room and add this to the list of things I'll compartmentalize by morning, categorize it between "one night in a hotel" and "her ankle in my hands," file it with every other piece of evidence that the prosecution could use if there were a trial for whatever I'm becoming.
"Tripp."
It's quiet. Barely a sound. Her lips move around it and the word comes out soft and slurred with sleep and she doesn't wake up, doesn't know I'm here.
One word. One name, and I don't know if she's dreaming or remembering or just reaching for something in the dark, but the name in her mouth is the one I killed on purpose.
It hits me somewhere I can't name, where clinical language doesn't reach.
Not arousal, not guilt, something worse than both.
The dead weight of a name I buried coming back alive in someone else's mouth.
She kept him. Not Remy Black, not Saint, not any of the versions I built to survive, but Tripp, the boy from the Garden District who hadn't learned yet that telling the truth gets people killed.
He was supposed to be gone. I made sure of it. And she's breathing him back to life in her sleep.
I close the door. The latch clicks with a sound so small it shouldn't register, but in this hallway at this hour it's the loudest thing I've ever heard.
My room. My bed. The dark.
I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, fingers digging into the sheets because my hands won't stop feeling her, the strand of hair between my fingers, her skin against my fingertip. Three identities. Eight years of disappearing. And the hands that never shake are shaking now.