"Hm?"
"You're bleeding."
"No, I'm not."
"I'm sorry, are we challenging object permanence now? I cansee it.Your shirt is soaked."
"It's old."
"Old as in—what, since when? We've been together for the past eighteen hours, except—" My stomach drops through the floorboards and into the abandoned mine below us. "The shots. This morning. When we left the cabin. One of themhityou."
"It grazed me," he corrects. "And it's shallow. I'm fine."
"You drove a snowmobile up a mountain for hours with abullet woundand didn't say anything?"
"There was nothing to say."
I'm off the bed before my ankle can file an objection. The blanket falls as I cross the hut in a fast-paced limp and plant myself between him and the stove.
"Sit down," I command.
"Caroline—"
"Sit. Down." I point at the bed. "I have been professionally trained in how to make hostile witnesses comply, and I swear to God, Afon, I will deploy every single tool in that arsenal. I will subpoena you until you cry."
He looks down at me. I look up at him. A chill rips through as the wind drags its talons across the roof. Wolf lifts his head, glances between us, and lays it back down with the weary patience of a dog who has already pegged how this ends.
"It's a graze," Afon says again.
"Wonderful. Then this'll be quick."
A muscle works in his jaw. He's clearly still inDefy Her At All Costs Mode.
And then, to my astonishment, he exhales through his nose, moves to the bed, and sits.
I retrieve the first-aid kit from the duffel. It's a serious one, a soft-sided military-looking thing, not the Duane Reade special with two Band-Aids and an expired Neosporin that lives under my bathroom sink at home. I kneel in front of him, open it on the floor, and look up.
"Shirt off."
He raises one eyebrow a quarter inch. By Afon Satyrin standards, that's basically an emotionally eloquent Broadway production.
"For medical purposes," I clarify, and I'm horrified to hear that my voice has gone up half an octave. "I need access to the wound. This is a clinical environment now. I'm basically a field medic."
"You're a contracts lawyer."
"Litigation, actually, and the wound doesn't know the difference."
He reaches back, fists the sweater between his shoulder blades, and pulls it over his head along with the thermal underneath, the way men do, in one motion, like they're just completely unaware that it's the sexiest thing of all time.
Okay.
So.
Here's the thing.
I saw him shirtless once before, through the window, the day I face-planted into his life. But that was at twenty yards, through glass, with a concussion incoming.
This is different.
