“We’re fine,” Bo tells him, chuckling.
Rowdy barks again.
“Buddy.”
Rowdy sits, but his ears stay up, and his eyes stay on me, unconvinced.
Bo’s hands are still on my arms. “Talk to me. Are you okay?”
I look down at my leg, which is starting to burn a little. There’s a scrape along my right calf from where I caught the ladder frame on the way down. It’s not deep, just raw, and my skin is striped pink across the surface.
“Yep, I’m good. That’s nothing,” I say.
“Sit down.”
“Bo—”
“Falon.” He says it quietly, and I can hear in his tone that there’s no room for argument. “Sit.”
He leads me to the second step of the staircase, then disappears into the kitchen and returns with the first-aid kit from under the sink. Working on a ranch since birth should make me less accident-prone, but alas, no. That’s why I keep a first-aid kit on every level of the house and even stash a few in the barn.
He kneels in front of me, opens the kit, and his hand closes around my ankle to tip my leg toward the light. His focus is on the scrape, but the touch of his hand has me focusing really hard on anything but that.
The furrow between his brows. The way his jaw sets when he’s concentrating. The particular steadiness of his hands.
Get a grip, Falon. Now is not the moment to obsess over how his brow furrows or his jaw sets. Focus on literallyanything but the fact that I’m fixated on every move he makes. Why can’t I stop noticing?
He cleans the scrape. Presses a folded square of gauze against the worst part, holds it there for a moment, and the motion and whatever he put on it stings a bit. I inhale through my teeth.
“Oh, it’s not that bad.”
“Yeah, easy for you to say, you’re not the one on the other end.” I smile a little as our teasing starts to make a reappearance.
“Anywhere else? Or is it just your leg?” Bo smirks, and a little more of me melts.
“Nope, just the leg.” And my ego.
Rowdy pads over and drops his chin on my knee. I put my hand on his head. His tail wags, slow and content.
“You were going to do this alone,” he says. His voice is quiet, but I can hear the edge underneath it. I don’t know if he’s angry.
“Iwasdoing it alone.”
“You were hanging from a banister.”
“Yeah, temporarily. But I wasn’t going to be there all day.” I make a cringy expression. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
He looks up. His jaw tightens, and a subtle shift in his expression makes my chest tight. I can’t tell if he’s about to say something or swallow it back down.
He looks around at what I was doing and where the ladder is. “The ladder base needs to go against the wall on the left side,” he says. “Not where you had it.”
“There’s a floorboard lip on the left side.”
“I know. And now that I’m here, I’ll even brace it for you.”
I look at him, fighting a smile. “So we’re doing this together, huh? Subtle, by the way.”
“Yeah, and I thought so too.” He stands, snaps the first aid kit shut, and sets it on the hall table beside the chandelier bracket. “You still want it up today?”
