Nash
My pulse still hasn’t come down.
I’m pacing my bedroom like a caged animal, wearing a path into the hardwood I refinished with my own two hands. Everything about that bathroom encounter was a mistake.
The towel barely covering the swell of her breasts, the curve of her hips.
The steam and the silence and the sound of her breath catching just inches from my ear.
I drag a hand down my face and mutter a curse into the empty room.
The memory of her leaning into me, dripping and flushed and soft in ways I’ve barely let myself imagine, has my self-control hanging by a thread. Because what I’m feeling isn’t just physical. It’s the way she says myname when she’s teasing. The way she smiles at the coffee I make before she’s up. How she hums through physical therapy even when it hurts. That little crease between her brows when she’s focused.
And how she’s slowly, impossibly, turning my house into something warm andhumanagain.
She’s not a stray I’m patching up out of guilt.
She’s Lucy.
And she’s cracking me wide open.
I stop pacing long enough to drop onto the edge of the bed.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. I pace over to see an email from Justin Frank, the Chief of Emergency Medicine.
Instead of reading it, I open my messages and go straight for Bennett’s thread.
Brass Lantern?
Three dots appear almost instantly.
Bennett
You paying?
If I have to
So… no
Got it
I chuckle. Justbarely.
20 mins?
Make it 25 and I’ll let you brood in peace before I make you tell me why we’re rushing out for beer on a random Wednesday
Deal.
I shove the phone into my pocket and head for the door.
I need air.
Noise.
Beer cold enough to shock some goddamn sense back into me.
Because if I spend one more night sleeping just down the hall from Lucy Calder, I’m going to forget every reason I had for keeping my hands off her and my heart closed to her.
