Humour fought a battle with the searing pain I was inflicting on him. He liked this, even if he wasn’t enjoying it. “All right,” he ground out. “You win.”
I pulled my hand back. Cam closed his eyes and I left him to collect himself while I gathered some supplies from the kitchen—ice packs and painkillers, the good ones that would help him sleep if I convinced him to take them, and some regular ibuprofen.
Back in the bedroom, he hadn’t moved, save to wrap an arm around himself.
I gently pried it free and applied the ice to his bruised ribs and abdomen. “You can breathe?”
“Yeah.”
“Movement?”
“I can do everything, it just fucking hurts.”
“Good boy.”
Cam bared his teeth at me.
I laughed and it was the most human I’d felt since we’d last been this close.
The icing took a while. I strapped the packs to him with a towel to catch any escaping moisture and held up the pills I’d brought from the kitchen. “You have options.”
Cam squinted in the dim light. “Vicodin? Where’d you get that?”
“Somewhere that wasn’t here.”
“Is it good?”
“It will help you rest. You have not slept for a while?”
“Can’t remember.”
I turned that over in my mind. If he hadn’t slept, he probably hadn’t eaten either, and as tough as I knew Cam to be, we needed to rectify that before we put any medication in his body. “Take the ibuprofen while I get you some food. You can take the Vicodin later if you are still uncomfortable.”
“I never said I was uncomfortable, Lexi. You did.”
Lexi.There was not much I wouldn’t do for him when he called me that. I couldn’t explain it, but the affection he crammed into the fact that he was too lazy to speak my whole name did inexplicable things to me.
It made me want to open my refrigerator andcook himsome real food.Cam, what have you done to me?
I fed him the ibuprofen and retreated to the kitchen. My fridge contained nothing but eggs, chicken, and spinach, but I remembered the healthy meal he’d cooked me in his cosy cottage and threw it all in a pan. The result was protein and iron heavy and seasoned with the Creole spice mix that had fallen out of a magazine I’d read on the last international flight I’d taken.
It looked passable.
I took it back to the bedroom. Cam was sitting up and poking at his phone, a deep frown marring his handsome face. “Everything okay?”
He grunted and tossed the phone aside. “I’d be better if people didn’t text me shit that made no fucking sense.”
“Is it your green-eyed bodyguard?”
“Saint?”
I handed Cam the plate, absorbing the light in his eyes as he studied it, cataloguing two certainties from it.
He’s hungry.
No one ever cooks for him.
“Yes, Saint. Is he outside? I have more food.”
