Chapter 1 #3
That was just an observation, he assured himself. Not something he was going to do anything about. He put that thought away next to the one about her scent, and focused on the obstacle of the stairs. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to manage them at all.
But, much to his surprise, there was a stair lift attached to the wall of the narrow staircase behind the door, which was new since the last time Pax had been there. He looked at it with skepticism.
“We installed it because of Dad’s knees,” Bree said simply. “Don’t argue. It’s rated to three-fifty and it’s the fastest way to get you off that leg.”
“This is the most humiliating thing that’s happened to me in recent memory,” he said, which was not quite true. Lying in a drainage culvert outside Salt Lake City while his jaguar slowly rebuilt his leg millimeter by millimeter had been somewhat worse, but nobody had been there to witness it.
“Your memory must be selective.” She held the chair while he got himself situated. “Because I seem to remember a certain incident with a fire ant hill and a dare—”
“We agreed never to speak of that again,” he snapped, grinning despite himself. Bree always was able to coax him into a better mood, no matter the circumstances.
“We agreed you’d never speak of it. I made no such promises,” she replied in a mock prim tone.
He almost smiled again and something in her expression shifted before she turned to push the button that would start the lift.
The chair began its slow ascent and she followed alongside on foot.
He looked at her profile in the soft stairwell light and thought about the years that had passed and how strange it was that time could make a person both completely different and exactly the same.
“Your leg,” she said as they reached the top. “Is it really bad?”
“It’s improving.”
“That’s not what I asked, Pax.”
She held his gaze with a look in her eye that demanded a straight answer. Dammit, he could never say no to her.
“Okay,” he said placatingly. “It was pretty bad when it happened. It’s getting better. Another few days and I’ll be nearly back to normal.”
She nodded once, accepting. No dramatics. No excessive sympathy. She just received the information and moved on. He’d forgotten how much he appreciated that about her.
“Let’s get you into the spare room,” she said, and showed him where to go. “It’s not fancy, but there’s a place to lie down, if you need to. Just ignore the desk and other clutter. We use this as a second office when we need extra space for long-term projects.”
She left him there while she ran back downstairs to tell her father she was taking a break.
Pax sat on the edge of the small daybed and looked out the single window at the slice of Main Street visible from this angle.
It looked like just an ordinary morning in his hometown.
He’d spent years moving through some of the most dangerous places on earth and here he was, needing a stair lift and a sit-down after a quick trip to buy a hinge.
His jaguar, the traitor, was not remotely troubled by any of this. His jaguar was busy cataloging the scent of the woman who’d helped him up the stairs and finding the whole situation deeply satisfactory.
“Stop it,” he told himself. His inner jaguar ignored him, which was typical.
Bree came back and the next hour was quietly domestic. She arranged pillows under his leg, and called his mother so she wouldn’t send out search parties looking for him. Bree talked to Estelle Rojas on the phone with the same calm competence she’d shown in everything else.
He heard his mother’s voice going high with worry and Bree’s calmer tones bringing it back down. She stood in the doorway when the call was over.
“Your mother offered to come here,” Bree said, “but your father is out in his pickup truck, and someone took her car. She wants you to know that she fully intends to have words with you about sneaking out, and she’s just delaying them, not canceling them.”
“That’s fair,” Pax said with an amused shrug.
“She also asked me to make sure you ate something.” Bree considered him. “Which, looking at the size of you, seems like a reasonable request. I’ll see what we have in the kitchen.” She turned to go.
“Bree.”
She stopped and looked back at him.
He meant to say thank you. That was the appropriate thing. Instead, what came out was, “I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you sooner. When we visited home before, we should have.”
“Yeah,” she said after a short pause. “You should have.” Then, before the weight of that could settle too hard, she asked, “Chicken soup or a sandwich?”
“Both?” he tried.
The smile returned, wider this time. “That’s more like the Paxton Rojas I remember.” She disappeared toward the kitchen, and he lay back against the pillows. He stared up at the ceiling and had an internal conversation with his jaguar about boundaries.
His jaguar was unimpressed.
He could hear the sound of Bree moving around in the kitchen. She was a good sport about making soup and a sandwich for a man she hadn’t seen in fifteen years. It didn’t occur to him until much later that he was smiling just thinking about her.