I blinked at the small talk. It felt strange, coming from him. Normal. Like we were coworkers at a water cooler instead of a nurse and inmate in a concrete cage.
“It is.”
“What’d you think?”
I huffed out something that might have been a laugh. “It was … eventful.”
“Yeah?” One eyebrow lifted. The corner of his mouth that wasn’t split twitched upward. “Interesting eventful or regretting-your-life-choices eventful?”
“Jury’s still out.”
He paused. “For what it’s worth, you handled it well. The eventful parts.”
Something warm bloomed in my chest. I ignored it and steered the conversation back to my original question.
“Seriously”—I motioned to his lip—“where’s the other guy?”
“There is no other guy.”
I paused, cotton swab hovering. “You expect me to believe you got punched in the face and just walked away?”
He shrugged. Deliberately casual.
Too casual. Like he was hiding something.
Three times he’d wound up in my infirmary, three times I’d had my hands on him, and three times he’d shown up with damage that required exactly that.
Coincidence. It had to be coincidence. Tuesday was just a complication from Monday. And Monday, he hadn’t even met me before coming in here.
So, questioning this was silly. Right?
I brought the antiseptic-soaked cotton to his lip again. His gaze snapped to mine and held there. Didn’t waver. Didn’t blink. Just … held. Like he was daring me to look away first.
I didn’t.
My fingertips brushed the edge of his mouth, and I felt him inhale. Slow. Controlled. Like he was trying very hard not to react to my touch.
That made two of us.
There was no reason to feel … what the hell was I feeling? Nerves? It made sense, I suppose. In any other setting, touching a man’s lips would be intimate as hell. Especially a man who looked like he’d been carved specifically to destroy a woman’s common sense.
A man who sucked the air out of every room with the intensity behind his focus.
“I’ve done a little digging on you,” I admitted.
“You were digging into me?” Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile, but close. Like the idea of me being curious about him was … unexpected. Welcome even.
His voice dropped half a register. “Should I be flattered?”
The low rumble of his tone did things to my nervous system. Unprofessional things.
“You’re one of my patients.” I kept my voice light. Nonchalant. Like I hadn’t spent an embarrassing amount of time last night staring at my ceiling, wondering about this man. “I’ll be tending to your … doorknob injuries for the foreseeable future. Call it professional curiosity.”
Curiosity. That’s all it was. Because objectively speaking, if I’d seen him anywhere else—a coffee shop, a grocery store, literally anywhere outside these concrete walls—I’d notice him. The tattoos crawling up his neck and disappearing into his buzzed hair might signal he wasn’t some standard accountant,sure. But by all accounts, the man had everything going for him in the looks department.
Which made me wonder: why? Why would someone who looked like this, who could’ve had any normal life, end up here?
“And what did you find?”
