Chapter Four
Scorch
I'D BARELY SLEPT.
Not the wound. The wound was manageable. The problem was the woman on the other side of the wall: the sounds of her settling in, then up at midnight for water, then quiet again, and my brain doing what it did in unfamiliar spaces, which was refuse to go dark.
My cock had been running its own agenda since about hour two. The idea of doing something about it had come and gone fast: she was ten feet away, a light sleeper apparently, and that felt like the wrong note to open on. I'd decided to wait her out.
That had been optimistic.
I sat up on the edge of the bed. Spare room, narrow, the neighbor's fence past the glass, early light coming in low and gold. I listened. Down the hall: movement. A cabinet. Running water. She was up.
I pulled on jeans and the black tee and went.
Whitley stood at the counter with her back to me, sleep shorts and a worn tee, dark blonde hair loose all the way down her back. I'd had twenty hours in this house to look at Whitley Stahl. I had every chance I'd gotten. Every bit of her.
I leaned in the doorway. "Morning. Thought I heard you up."
She turned. "There's coffee if you want some."
"Yeah. Please."
"How do you take it?"
"Just black, thanks."
She poured a second mug and slid it across the counter.
"How's the pain?" she said, after a moment.
"Zero."
She looked at me over the rim.
"Three," I said.
The line of her mouth softened for a second. Not quite the smile she never gave me. Close, though. "I'll do the dressing after we finish these."
"You know," I said, "in the hospital that line had a lot more authority to it."
"The line is exactly as authoritative as it was yesterday." She picked up her mug. "You just look more comfortable ignoring it now that you're out of the gown."
"The gown was not my best showing."
"It wasn't your worst either. You had a very confident attitude about it."
"I maintain a confident attitude about most things."
"Shirt off please. Sit down." She was already pulling out the wound kit.
"We haven't even finished the coffee."
"You can bring it with you. I've got a full shift's worth of patience for your recovery and approximately none for you reopening that suture line because you reached for something on a high shelf."
I pulled off the tee, brought the mug, and sat at the table.
She came around behind me, same hands she'd used at the hospital, same focused quiet, but Memorial Hermann had a monitor beeping and approximately nine things between her and whatever she was actually thinking.
Her kitchen had none of that. The difference settled into my jaw before I got ahead of it.
"Healing well," she said.
"Told you."
"You told me zero out of ten pain this morning, so I'm taking your self-assessments with some adjustment."
"I said three."
"Selective memory." She pressed the new dressing edges down, ran her thumb along the tape to seal it, and stepped back. "You look good."
I turned around on the chair. She was right there, close enough that turning put us at about the same distance as last night over the dinner table, and she didn't step back.
"In a clinical sense," she added, and picked up her cup.
"Sure," I said. "That's what I thought you meant."
She walked back to the counter and I watched her go, my eyes dropping immediately to her ass.
My phone buzzed on the table. Brim's name on the screen.
"Give me a minute," I said, and stepped out back. The yard was small, the live oak throwing shade across the grass, May doing its thing.
"What's up, Prez."
"You good?" Brim said.
"Good. Where are we on Saturday?"
"Saints confirmed at thirty-two. Pecos Devils hauling from Odessa, seventeen men, on the road by six Friday." A pause. "Detour volunteered for the ride-out route."
"Tell him no."
"Told him no twice. He keeps volunteering."
"Tell him I'll run the route from the truck and he can ride sweep where I can see him."
Brim made the sound he made when a problem had been solved to his satisfaction. "Cricket says you've got a situation with a nurse."
"Cricket talks too much."
"Cricket is accurate. You coming Saturday or are you going to keep convalescing?"
"On-site by noon." And he was gone.
I came back inside. Whitley had two bowls out and a cereal box in each hand: Froot Loops in one, Frosted Flakes in the other, milk already on the table.
I looked at the boxes. "I'd have put you at bran flakes. Oats, maybe."
She set them down. "I am a trauma nurse. I have seen things no human being should see before seven a.m." She pulled out her chair. "I have earned my Froot Loops."
"Fair point." I reached for the Frosted Flakes and sat.
She poured her bowl with the same focus she'd been giving everything since she walked in her door, and I thought: yeah. That's my woman.
"Trouble?" she asked, chin tipping toward my phone.
"Volunteer situation." I poured my own bowl. "One of my guys keeps putting himself forward to run the ride-out route. Nobody wants that."
"Why not?"
"Last time he navigated, we ended up on a county road the county stopped maintaining in 2019."
She considered that over a spoonful. "And he keeps volunteering anyway."
"Detour operates on enthusiasm over evidence. Brim, our president, put him on permanent no for route-running. Detour filed that as a standing challenge."
"How many men are we talking about?"
"Three clubs. Forty-nine confirmed."
We worked through the cereal without needing to fill the quiet, which was its own kind of thing. Outside the mockingbird ran its morning set.
"Where is it?" she asked, after a moment.
"Outside Bandera." I watched her face. "Hill Country in May, darlin'. Live music, good brisket, bluebonnets still going if we're lucky." I let the drawl go warmer. "You know exactly what it's like. Offer still stands."
She pointed her spoon at me. "Your brisket better be as good as you say it is."
I'd take it.
The morning went steady after that. She had things to do and I found things to do that didn't involve lifting, which put us in the same orbit without requiring a plan about it.
She was reorganizing the top shelf of the hall closet when I came past, balanced on her toes, two inches short of where she needed.
I reached over her head and set the box where she wanted it.
She turned and found me directly behind her. Her eyes went straight to my side.
"That," she said, "was a high shelf."
"I was careful."
"You are the worst patient I have ever had in my life."
Something crossed her face then, not the exasperation but something under it, there and gone before she put the rest back.
"But thank you," she added, her voice gone quiet.
"I can reach things." I stepped back. "While I'm here."
"So noted," she said, and went back to the kitchen at a pace that was almost not hurried.
SHE CAME OUT TO THE porch mid-afternoon with two water glasses and caught me crouched at the loose board.
"I see you," she said.
"Twenty-minute fix. I'm not lifting anything."
"There are two boards."
"Forty minutes."
"You are not fixing either of them." She handed me a glass and took the other chair. "You pull at those stitches, you'll land back in a hospital bed with paperwork I don't want to file."
She settled back. "How long has it been since you've sat still for a full day?"
"Define full."
"Without a route to run or a problem to solve."
I thought about it honestly. "Can't place it."
She nodded.
"Good thing I found the right porch," I said.
The dry look came over the rim of her glass. "I volunteered to drive you here. Don't push your luck."
"Sweetheart," I said, "luck has nothing to do with it."
She looked out at the yard. The smile got halfway there before she caught it.
SHE WAS AT THE STOVE when I came in from the porch, the kitchen going orange with the last light through the window. She'd changed into jeans sometime in the afternoon, which had helped exactly nothing.
I found plates in the second cabinet I tried, poured a beer for me and the last of a bottle of white wine for her, and set the table.
She brought the food over, chicken and rice and a few things from the refrigerator that had come together better than they had any right to, and we sat across from each other.
The conversation went easy, the kind of easy that was its own kind of problem, because easy wasn't a word I usually reached for and I'd been reaching for it all day.
"This is nice," I said.
She set her fork down.
"Shannon," she said.
Calm as anything. Holding my gaze.
I set my beer down on the table.
I pushed back my chair and came around the table.
She didn't move away. I stopped in front of her chair and she looked up at me.
I took her face in both hands and kissed her.
She kissed me back immediately, fingers twisting into my tee, and I felt that from my jaw to my boots. I pulled back just enough to see her face. Her eyes were dark and her mouth still parted and she had the look of someone who'd just lost the first round and hadn't decided if that was a problem.
"Still want to play that game?" I said.
"I wasn't playing," she said.
"No," I said. "You weren't."
I walked her backward into the hallway and down to the spare room and she came without a word.
I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her across my lap in one clean move.
Her breath caught sharp.
"Shannon's the name you use when you want a reaction," I said, one hand pressed flat at her lower back. "I told you what I'd do about it."
"You did," she said, into the bedding.
"And you said it anyway."
"I said it because I wanted —"
I brought my palm down flat and deliberate on the soft flesh of her ass cheek, and the rest of that sentence disappeared into a gasp she couldn't have caught if she'd tried.
I held her there and ran my palm slow and certain over where I'd landed it, and the sound she made was exactly what I'd expected and nothing I'd been ready for.
"What did you want?" I said.
A beat of silence. "You know what I wanted."
"Say it."