“Comfy?” he asked with a smile. He’d created a little nest, which supported my body in all the right places to make me feel weightless.
“Yes, thank you.”
He sat atop the coffee table, directly facing me and rubbed his palms on his knees.
“Where did you learn to do that?” I repeated his question from the stairs. “Do they teach pillow fluffing at the Academy?”
He laughed. “No.” His face flushed, and he ran a hand through his hair. “No. I spent some time recovering from an injury and learned a lot about the proper placement of a pillow.”
The statement felt miles deep, and I wondered if it had to do with his security clearance being revoked. His face held a secret. I couldn’t help but probe. “What happened?”
He looked at me with his lips softly pressed together and shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
Something about the way he said it told me itdidmatter. A lot. Apparently, we were still keeping secrets from each other. I wanted to know his, but the look on his face told me not to ask.
“Do you want anything for the pain?” he asked and nodded at my foot.
The throbbing had stopped now that I wasn’t standing on it, and the ice was helping, but something to take the edge off sounded great.
“Yes. Got anything good? Any repo’ed narcotics? I could go for a line of Percocet,” I said with a suggestive bounce of my brows.
His face fell and his eyes widened in horror.
“Bray, I’m kidding. Jesus. I’m not a junkie. I’ll take some ibuprofen.”
He released a breath and stood from his table. He headed down the hall this time, and I wondered what Agent Calvin Bray’s bathroom looked like.
“You know, Ihavesampled my share of drugs though.” I found myself disclosing more information, and I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was being in his personal space and the fact that he was taking care of me, but I felt closer to him.
“Oh?” he said from down the hall.
“Yeah, unfortunately. I’ve been in a few situations where I couldn’t blow my cover and passing up on an offering would have done just that.”
He returned and placed two blue gel pills in my hand. “That sounds … awful.”
A laugh, of all things, burst from my throat. Most people asked which was my favorite when I talked about drugs, and then reliably launched into their own anecdotes of wild nights and hazy memories. In truth, I’d hated every last second of it. But if the alternative was a bullet in my head—or something worse—I’d take a line of coke any day.
Bray walked to the kitchen to get me a glass of water.
“It was awful. I hated when Wallace put me on drug cases. They were always the most dangerous and usually required me tododrugs at some point.” I rolled my eyes and accepted the glass of water.
Bray stared at me in awe while I sipped and swallowed the pills.
“What?” I asked him.
He shook his head like he was snapping out of a daze. “Nothing. You just talk about it like it was a bad day at the office, and not a threat to your life.”
A sad laugh shook my shoulders. “Well, I kind of have to think of it that way, you know? Don’t have much choice.”
He sat back down on the coffee table and leaned his elbowson his knees. He was only a foot away from me. “I’m sorry, Erin.” The sincere furrow in his brow and the sound of my real name put a hard lump in my throat. I had to take another sip of water.
Uncomfortable, I sat back against the pillows and sighed. “Well, at least the Del Rio moms aren’t intothatkind of smuggling—unless, are we sure they aren’t?”
Bray held my gaze, seeing through my attempt to joke and not bending. “They aren’t. I’ve checked.”
The heat of his eyes pushed a flush into my cheeks. I tried to fight it off with another quip. “Good. I’d hate to discover diapers full of heroin or something.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he said, his eyes still on me.
