She pulled off her cover-up and sat down, arranging herself on the lounger.
“How are you doing?”
She controlled her flush at his delicate question. Like she’d freak out if he asked after her state of mind. “I’m fine. You?”
“Good. The water’s warm, if you want to go in.”
She looked out at the lake. She always wanted to go in, but she’d rather take apart the mystery of Gabe. “Maybe in a little while.”
“How was your book?”
“Huh?”
“The book you were reading last night?”
Oh the book. Or rather, the prop she’d grabbed when she’d heard his heavy footsteps coming down the hall to the room she’d hidden in. “It was great.”
“What was it about?”
Organic chemistry. She hadn’t so much as cracked it open. She was smart, she wasn’t a masochist. “Uh, a mystery.”
“Maybe I’ll borrow it when you’re done.”
“Cool.” She made a mental note to find a mystery in the library later.
They lapsed into a comfortable silence, Gabe turning back to his tablet. She tried to surreptitiously crane her neck to see what he was doing.
“I’m drawing some flash designs,” he said, which told her she wasn’t as surreptitious as she’d hoped. “I do walk-in days occasionally.”
“Ah.”
He showed her the screen. He’d drawn two delicate birds on a flowering perch. She smiled. How such a large man could do such tiny, intricate work, she didn’t know. “That’s adorable.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ve thought about getting a tattoo,” she admitted.
“Yeah?” He kept his gaze on the tablet.
“I don’t know what I’d get, though.”
“Do you know where you’d want it?”
She touched the side of her ribs, under the bikini. “Right here.”
He spared her a quick glance. “Hmm. That’s specific.”
“I have a scar there.” Why she was telling him this, she didn’t know, except she supposed he made her feel comfortable in all situations.
He put down his pen and gave her his full attention. “From what?”
“When I was fifteen, I had pneumonia.” Her father had ignored it. The housekeeper had checked in on her, proclaimed she had the flu, and Eve had been young enough and sick enough to not insist on professional care even though it hadn’t felt like the flu.
Luckily, her brother had visited the house on a whim, had come up to her bedroom to see her. She had vague memories of Nicholas bundling her up and putting her in his car, the emergency room and people talking about antibiotics and surgery.
But she remembered the recovery very well, and her brother sleeping in her hospital room. Her father had stopped by twice a week, mostly so the hospital staff didn’t gossip about how he wasn’t visiting his daughter.
Nicholas was a good brother. There was a reason he was so overprotective and meddled so much in her life. In his eyes, she’d never stop being the fifteen-year-old kid who could have died without his intervention. “It was a long time ago, though. And it left no lasting effects.”
