Chapter 12
SEAMUS
I took her hands, resting them in my own, palms up.
Her hands felt impossibly small in mine, her skin impossibly soft.
Her wounds didn’t look too bad—her hands were scratched up, but a little antiseptic and ointment would fix them up.
Mine, on the other hand… I closed my eyes, willing the image of what had just happened—both a moment ago, and on the road—to go away long enough so I could focus on patching Chelsea up.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Of course.” I should have been asking her that.
But I already knew how she was—I could still feel the dampness of my shirt where she’d let out all the pain I knew she’d had coiled tight inside of her.
I don’t know what I’d been thinking holding onto her like that; it just felt like the only thing in the world I could do that might be right.
I knew what it felt like to have everything sparking like a live wire inside your chest.
Chelsea shifted where she sat, and I realized I’d been holding her hands in mine without doing anything.
I set her hands down in her lap and slid the first aid kit across the floor toward me.
It was a big red duffel I took to job sites.
Reilly and Sons valued safety as high as workmanship, and in all the years I did site work—from summers at age fifteen until I graduated college, full time in my twenties, to only a few days a month these days—we’d only had a handful of major injuries.
Most had been serviceable from this bag, which I always kept well-stocked.
“It’s just your hands?”
Chelsea shook her head, her eyes going to her knees.
Her pants—silky black, loose things with flowers on them that I’d thought at first was a skirt—were ripped on one knee. I hadn’t noticed earlier because of the dark color of the fabric, but both knees were damp with blood, staining the paler flowers red.
She gasped as she took in the torn fabric.
“I love these pants!” Then she groaned and flopped back against the couch, bringing her hands to her face, then remembering the injuries there, grit her teeth, and laid them back down.
“I’m supposed to be taking it easy. Trying to sort out my next steps, not hurting myself even more.
Do you ever feel like bad luck just sticks to you? ”
A normal person would have said something encouraging. It just feels that way. Things’ll look up soon. But who the hell was I to say anything about that? I felt the same way.
Of course she happened to be on my street when she nearly got hit by that car. It was like I was fucking cursed. Tainted. I’d thought things had been going better—the dinner, the easy rhythm we slipped into. The possibility of friendship.
But I’d been lying to myself. I’d been disarmed by Chelsea.
By the way she showed me exactly what she was thinking.
By how she found joy in things like chasing chickens and eating a meal she loved.
By how she’d listened to my stories about Kevin and New York without wanting to brush it off and move on to something simpler.
But of course I didn’t say that. All I said was, “Yes.”
She smiled, though there was no humor in it. Just a mutual understanding. I liked how she didn’t press for more. I remembered how much I liked that about her.
“Mind if I take a look?” I asked, indicating her knees.
She nodded, and I grasped the bottom of the pants. I could see why she liked them—they looked beautiful on her. But hell, a burlap sack would look beautiful on her. And she was right. They were probably ruined; the rip was bigger than I’d thought.
I pulled the wide legs over her knees, exposing her legs.
A jolt of heat shot through me as I took in the soft, newly exposed flesh of her calves.
She was wearing these lace-up black boots that were somehow both clunky and delicate.
Then I squinted at her socks, which were sticking up an inch above her boots.
I couldn’t help the small smile that rose on my lips. “Pizza socks?”
Chelsea blinked, then followed my gaze to her socks. Then she surprised me by grinning, bright and easy. “I forgot I was wearing those.” Her grin went wider, and I felt the air leave me.
She was so fucking gorgeous. There was one window in here, and as she leaned forward it cast soft, barely-autumn light across her face and hair, which fell in a soft, caramel curve against her cheek like it had the other night in my kitchen.
She still had the stains of bruises under her skin, and that bandage across her face, but those were a part of her, and all of her was beautiful.
After Chelsea had left my place, I’d had to give myself a talking-to for immediately ignoring the promise I’d made to her brother to look out for her.
I hadn’t looked out for her. I’d wanted her to stay.
I’d wanted to do things to her. When the words didn’t work, I’d stripped down and gotten into the shower, where I’d forced myself to jam the faucet all the way cold.
I thought that had done the trick—the breath was knocked out of me—and after a few minutes, I’d turned it back to warm.
But as that water sluiced over me, bringing my temperature back up, All I could do as I scrubbed myself with soap was replay images of Chelsea.
Chelsea, lying in my hammock, her arm thrown up over her head, as if she were in bed.
Chelsea, moaning as she’d eaten that burger, her tongue flicking out to catch a crumb.
Her body, soft and pert next to me at the sink.
Before I knew what was happening, my soaped-up hand had dropped between my legs and I was stroking my cock, hard at the memory of her body.
I’d finished, leaning up against the wet tile, thinking very un-protective thoughts about Chelsea Kelly.
The woman looking at me now. The woman whose thighs I was brushing with my fingers as I tucked the fabric of her pants under her legs and out of the way.
“Everybody likes pizza,” Chelsea said.
I pictured her eating a slice, licking her lips, moaning…
My dick twitched.
Jesus.
I pulled my hands away from her, reaching for the antiseptic tucked into the top of the kit.
“Everybody?” I asked, trying to distract myself. Willing my cock to behave itself.
“Don’t you like pizza?” There was laughter in her voice now, and I wanted desperately for it to stay. I wanted to tease her, to say something to make it come out, bubbling, so I could have the pleasure of hearing it.
It was selfish.
What would Eli do if he saw us now? If he knew what I was thinking?
Dad told me his favorite adage when I’d been a kid, and again when I’d started working for the business. Your word is your bond, Seamus. Everything rests on your word.
The antiseptic was the spray-on kind. “It’s okay.”
“Okay?!”
I held the back of her knee, praying the thickening at my crotch would go away when she cursed me out for hurting her with this spray.
I looked her in the eye. “I like simple ones. None of that meat-lovers all-dressed stuff.”
Chelsea gaped. “But you ate burgers the other day?”
“Burgers are for burgers.” I spritzed the antiseptic on her right knee.
“Ow!” She jerked her leg sideways.
“Margherita,” I said, dabbing at the dripping antiseptic with gauze.
“I… what?” She sucked air through her teeth with each touch.
“Margherita pizza. That’s my favorite.”
“With tomato sauce and b-bocconcini, right?”
“And basil. And a crust as thin as paper. You okay?”
She let out a breath, still grimacing. “I’m fine. But you distracted me. It won’t happen again. Where can you get that?”
“What, Margherita?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there is this one place…” I glanced out the window as if a new pizza place might have sprung up outside.
She took the bait, following my gaze with a frown.
“It’s not here, sadly.” I spritzed the other knee.
“Jesus!” She jumped.
I reached for the gauze. “New York has the best Margherita outside Italy. Also, gotcha.”
Chelsea narrowed her eyes, but I could see the slight curl in her lips.
As I patted around the wound with the gauze, I saw her cringe. I needed to keep her distracted. But small talk wasn’t exactly my thing. Then I spotted the bag Dad had picked up; the doggie bags spilling out of it and realized we hadn’t even talked about the dog. “So whose puppy was that?”
“Lola?”
“No, that other dog.”
She narrowed her eyes, but laughed.
“A friend’s.”
She must have seen the question on my face; the one I didn’t mean to pose. A guy’s?
“My friend Mia. Lola is her boyfriend’s dog. Though, boyfriend is a loose term. They’ve only been dating… God, not even a couple of weeks?”
“Why does Mia have the dog?”
“She said something about someone giving him the dog, that he didn’t want it. He has a full-time job, and she doesn’t. Except she has an interview today—right now—that’s why I have her.”
“So what’s going to happen with Lola if she gets the job?”
She frowned. “I don’t know, actually. Lola’s adorable, but she’s a handful.”
“She just needs some training.”
Chelsea studied me a moment. “You know about dogs?”
“A little.” I reached for a bandage. I did like dogs. Some dogs, anyway. Some dogs very much. But I didn’t want to keep going with this line of conversation.
But for once, she didn’t get the hint. Or more likely, she didn’t want to. “Why don’t you have one? Your place would be perfect for a dog. All that space, the walking paths. Plus, they’re a nice non-verbal companion.”
For a moment, I froze. With that smallest comment, she made it clear she knew me. The truth was, I’d thought about getting a dog a hundred times over. But the thought made my chest clamp too.
I met her eyes, briefly. “Kevin had a dog.”
“Kevin?”
“My older brother.”
“Ah.” Chelsea said.
So she knew about Kevin.
She didn’t say anything for a moment, just watched as I took out fresh gauze, scissors, and tape.
She was giving me space to continue.