Chapter 10
Killian POV
I tore my hand away from hers as if her skin had caught fire.
The pain was clean. The pain made sense.
What had just happened on that vinyl table was a fucking hazard.
"Put your coat on," I grated, not looking at her.
My voice was stripped of inflection, flat as a lead sheet. I snatched my gray team track pants off the floor, dragged them over my compression shorts, and yanked my heavy black hoodie over my skull. The cotton rubbed against the raw heat of my chest, suffocating me.
Behind me, the vinyl of the examination table rustled as Nadia slid down to the deck. Her breath was coming fast, shallow and ragged in the quiet room.
"Castaneda—"
"I said put the coat on, Gregory," I barked, grabbing my duffel and shoving my phone into my pocket with a violent jerk of my wrist. "It's five-fifty. The snowplows haven't hit the lower lots. You're not walking through a whiteout to your apartment."
She stood there by the diagnostic cart, her fingers trembling slightly as she buttoned the front of her waxed jacket.
Her cheeks were stained with high, uneven streaks of crimson, her dark honey eyes dilated until the amber was almost drowned in black.
Her lips were wet, parted, still swollen from the heat that had hung between us.
She opened her mouth to argue—I could see the sharp retort gathering behind her teeth—but she looked at the set of my jaw and swallowed it down.
I kicked the lab door open, letting the heavy steel slam against the concrete corridor.
We climbed the stairs in absolute, suffocating silence.
Outside, the gale had turned the world into a howling void of frozen white.
The wind off Lake Superior hit us the second we cleared the arena vestibule, driving ice pellets horizontally into our faces, freezing the moisture on my eyelashes in three seconds flat.
Nadia tucked her chin into her collar, stumbling as a fifty-mile-an-hour gust caught the hem of her coat.
I reached out, grabbed the nylon strap of her satchel, and hauled her straight toward my black pickup idling under the flickering sodium lights of the staff lot. I threw the passenger door open, waited until she climbed into the high cab, and slammed the heavy steel shut behind her.
I rounded the hood, fighting the wind, and hauled myself behind the wheel.
* * *
The cab of the truck was freezing, the vinyl bench seat stiff as cardboard under my thighs.
I yanked the gear selector into reverse, the transmission clunking hard as the four-wheel drive engaged. The defroster roared to life, spitting lukewarm air against the frosted glass of the windshield, blurring the swirling snow into jagged streaks of gray light.
The smell inside the closed vehicle was immediate, inescapable, and thick enough to choke on.
My cedar cologne. The bitter tang of wintergreen from my thigh. And the subtle, sharp warmth of her skin, filling every cubic inch of the small compartment until the air felt scarce.
My knuckles turned chalk-white against the worn leather of the steering wheel. A tendon in my left forearm twitched violently, over and over, keeping time with the frantic, heavy pounding behind my ribs.
I couldn't look at her. If I looked at her, I was going to lose whatever scrap of discipline I had left.
"Don't flatter yourself about what happened down there," I said.
The words came out too fast, rough as cracked glass, scraping along the dashboard.
Nadia didn't move. In my peripheral vision, she sat rigid against the passenger door, her hands fisted in the lap of her coat.
"You were doing a job," I pressed, my teeth grinding together until my jawbone ached down into my neck. "You're a kinesiology major checking a hematoma. If you think rubbing some oil into my quad means anything outside that basement, you're out of your mind."
The silence in the cab held for two seconds, tight and toxic.
Then, the metallic click of a seatbelt buckle sounded like a gunshot.
"Pull over," Nadia said.
Her voice wasn't loud, but it had a razor edge that cut straight through the roar of the defroster.
"We're on the access road," I growled, staring straight ahead at the twin cones of my headlights cutting through the blizzard. "I'm dropping you at your porch."
"I said pull this damn truck over, Killian!"
She turned in the seat, her boots planting against the transmission tunnel, her eyes blazing with a fury so hot it seemed to melt the frost off the passenger window.
"Pull over, or I swear to God I'll yank the emergency brake while we're moving."
A red flare of temper blinded my vision. I stomped on the brake pedal, turning the wheel hard to the right. The truck slid sideways through a drift of fresh powder before biting into the gravel shoulder of the deserted lower lot, coming to an abrupt halt beneath a dead streetlight.
I jammed the shifter into park, killed the wipers, and spun around to face her.
"What is your problem?" I snarled, leaning across the center console until my shadow engulfed her.
"My problem?" She didn't shrink into the upholstery. She leaned straight toward me, her chest heaving against her coat, her face inches from mine. "My problem is that you are the most pathetic coward I have ever met in my life!"
The word hit me like a stick check to the throat. My breath backed up, hot and poisonous. "Watch your mouth, Gregory."
"No!" she shot back, her voice shaking with an intensity that vibrated through the metal frame of the cab.
"You sit there acting like you're carved out of stone, barking orders and hiding behind your jersey.
But you're terrified. You're terrified because for five minutes down there, you couldn't play the enforcer.
You were in pain, and you were human, and you let me see it! "
"You don't know shit about what I feel," I rasped, my hands gripping the edge of the vinyl seat until the foam grooved under my fingers.
"I felt your heart beating beneath my hands!
" she yelled, her eyes flashing with unshed tears of pure frustration.
"I felt your hands shaking on my wrist! Stop lying to me, Killian.
Stop acting like I'm just a signature on a grant form when you look at me like you want to tear my clothes off every time we're in the same room! "
* * *
The last wall inside my chest didn't fall. It detonated.
I didn't think. I didn't calculate the risk to my eligibility, the draft, or the sixty hours hanging over my head.
I lunged across the center console, my large hand shooting out to wrap firmly around the back of her neck. My calloused fingers tangled into the thick, dark curls at her nape, anchoring her in place, tilting her chin upward with an unyielding, deliberate pressure.
Nadia’s breath hitched in her throat—a tiny, broken sound.
She didn't pull away. She leaned into my grip, her small, cold hands reaching up to fist into the fabric of my hoodie right over my collarbones, anchoring me to her just as fiercely.
I dragged her forward until her chest was pressed flush against mine, her knees bracketing my thigh on the passenger seat. The heat passing between our bodies was suffocating, obliterating the blizzard outside the fogged glass.
My left hand came up, framing the sharp angle of her jaw. My thumb, rough and broad, dragged slowly across her bottom lip, pulling the soft, pink flesh down until her mouth parted on a ragged gasp.
"You think I'm lying?" I whispered, my voice a ruined, gravelly rasp that scraped against her mouth.
Her dark eyes were wide, black voids reflecting the faint green glow of the instrument panel. Her pulse was hammering so violently against my fingers at her jawline that it felt like an engine about to throw a rod.
"Tell me," she breathed, her lips brushing the pad of my thumb with every syllable. "Tell me you didn't feel that."
I leaned in until the tip of my nose brushed the curve of her cheek.
My breath was ragged, burning hot, washing across her parted lips.
Every muscle in my body was locked, screaming at me to crush my mouth onto hers, to taste the defiance and the anger and the heat until there was nothing left of either of us.
"I feel it, Nadia," I rasped, my lips hovering a millimeter above hers, so close I could feel the moisture of her exhale. "I feel it every goddamn second. It's in my blood. It's making me sick."
Her eyelids fluttered shut, her fingers tightening in my shirt, pulling me down that final, impossible fraction of an inch.
"Killian," she whispered, a plea stripped of pride.
"Why won't you let me drown in peace?" I murmured against her mouth. "Why do you have to fight me for every inch?"
Her chin tilted up. Her lips brushed mine—just a microscopic graze of heat, a promise of total ruin that made my spine go rigid with raw, unadulterated hunger.
BZZZ. BZZZ. BZZZ.
The harsh, violent vibration of my phone buzzed against the plastic cup holder, rattling against an empty aluminum can with a sharp, metallic screech.
The screen flared bright white in the dark cab.
Great Lakes Spinal Institute — Automated Care Update.
The cold reality slammed into my skull like a bucket of slush.
I froze.
My mouth was hovering an eighth of an inch from hers. My thumb was still pinned to her lip. Her breath was hot against my jaw, her small hands still gripping my chest like she never wanted to let go.
The phone vibrated again, relentless, a brutal reminder of the hundred and forty thousand dollars, the wheelchair in Duluth, and the fact that I was a wrecking ball that destroyed everything it touched.
Slowly, agonizingly, I dragged myself back.
My fingers slipped from her neck, leaving her skin bare and burning in the cold air of the cab. I forced my hands onto the steering wheel, my chest heaving in deep, ragged bursts as I stared through the fogged glass at the swirling snow.
Nadia stayed frozen on the edge of the seat, her lips parted, her chest rising and falling in the exact same frantic, broken rhythm as mine.
She didn't speak. She didn't have to.
The silence between us was deafening. The rules, the clinical distance, the hatred—every single defense we had built to survive each other was lying in ruins on the floorboards.
I put the truck in drive and stepped on the gas.
Act One was over.
And the next time our lips touched, nothing in this world was going to stop me from taking everything she had.