“River—”
“Might be your little brother, but he’s also a grown-arse man who can look after himself.”
He really wasn’t, but Fawn wasn’t about to get into that conversation right now. If River needed her, she would go to him.
“I wantyourpromise on that before I go to my bedroom.” Declan had obviously picked up on something in her expression that made him doubt he could trust her without that promise.
She chose her words carefully. “If I need to go out, for whatever reason, I’ll make sure to tell you first.”
Again, he studied her through narrowed lids. “Make sure that you do.”
“Sir. Yes, sir.” She stood to attention and gave him a mocking salute.
“Little girl, if you were under my command, you would spend more time outside doing punishment press-ups than you would on duty.”
The imagery was so vivid that Fawn found herself smiling. “I’m sorry to say that I’ve only ever managed to get to the count of eight.”
Declan’s brows rose. “You counted them? Well, of course you did.” The frown lifted. “You have a younger brother who has no doubt challenged you to a contest a time or two.”
“When we were younger, and which he always won,” she confirmed before sobering. “I… Declan, are we okay?” She looked up at him imploringly. The last thing she wanted was for those kisses they had shared to make things awkward between them going forward.
“We’re fine,” he dismissed without hesitation. “Another thing about no longer being a teenager is that I don’t spend all my waking hours lusting after women.”
Fawn wasn’t sure whether she felt reassured or insulted by that remark. The plural Declan had used, women instead of woman specifically, certainly displeased her.
But she couldn’t have her cake and eat it too. In other words, she couldn’t want Declan to lust after her,specifically, at the same time as she requested their relationship remain on a professional level of patient and nurse.
Even if the latter wasn’t really what she wanted.
By the timeDeclan reached the privacy of his bedroom, after checking through the rest of his apartment—even with all the high-tech security in place, he still felt compelled to ensure Fawn’s safety by checking out the whole space himself—the idea of taking his own pleasure had faded into more of an ache than the demand for immediate release.
Instead, he sat on the side of the bed and did what he did every night before getting into bed.
Normally, the photograph of Connall would be sitting on top of the bedside table. But Linus had done a good job earlier of putting away all the photographs Declan kept around the apartment of his son. He had slipped this one into the top drawer of the unit.
It was of Connall and Declan, the two of them lying on the floor after having set up the train set he’d given his young son for Christmas.
Connall would have been about three at the time, with curly blond hair and huge blue eyes set in a laughing face not yet formed into the man he would become—Shouldhave become, Declan corrected himself achingly.
Declan had been only twenty-five, and he only had to look in a mirror to see the differences in himself from then to now. The young man lying next to the enthralled little boy, as they watched the red train circle the track, still had thick, dark, curly hair, and the lines beside his eyes were from laughter and happiness, not age and sadness.
If Declan was feeling generous, nowadays he would call himself craggy. On the days he wasn’t, he would just call it like it was: he was middle-aged, and looked it, and any hint of real happiness had eluded him for a very long time.
He raised his head to look across the room in the direction of the bedroom across the hallway. He’d meant what he said earlier; he had wanted to kiss and touch Fawn from the moment he first saw her. Trouble was, he didn’t have anything else to offer her other than passion. He had loved once, unwisely, and he associated losing his son with that ill-fated love.
The number of times he had asked himself if Connall had been with him that day, instead of with Bridget and her husband, whether his son would still be safe and here with him.
The answer to that question was always the same. Connallwasn’there, safe or otherwise. He never would be.
After one last lingering look, Declan put the photograph back in the drawer before closing it and turning his attention to taking the pills Fawn had left on the bedside unit, along with a glass of water. He’d barely had time to swallow them down when the vibration of his cell phone in his pocket told him he had an incoming call.
A glance at the screen identified that caller. “Linus,” he greeted tersely.
“The one and only,” the young man came back unabashed.
Declan released a heavy sigh, knowing he was redirecting his current frustration onto the other man. “What can I help you with?” he returned in a pleasanter tone.
“Just reporting in. I thought you would want to know that the man your pretty nurse shares her apartment with?—”
