This time around, I'm two feet away in firelight, and I have a job to do, and the job involvestouching him,and my brain has chosen this moment to crash like a MacBook with a bajillion tabs open.
He's built. But notbuiltbuilt. He may be the size of The Rock, but he's rough and imperfect like anactualrock. Not gym-sculpted, nothing decorative about it, just dense functional mass laid down by decades of actual work. The scars I glimpsed through the window are all here at close range: the long one down his sternum, pale and ancient; the puckered one across his ribs; a constellation of smaller marks I didn't see before. Topping it all off like his body is a Christmas tree is the eight-pointed star on his throat. There's silver in the hair on his chest, like tinsel, glittering in the firelight.
Oh, God. I didn't know I had an older man fetish until right this second. I havefeelingsabout topic, none of them fit for polite society, and I am going to need every single one of them to get back in their assigned seats immediately.
"The shirt is off," Afon says dryly.
"I'm painfully aware."
"Would you like my pants off, too?"
"No!" I blurt. My cheeks are red hot. Who needs a fire? We have an endless fuel source for warmth: my constant state of embarrassment around this man. "No lower half nudity, for God's sake."
"Is something wrong?" he prods. "You look flustered."
I cast my eyes downward so I don't have to see the tiny smirk growing in the corner of his mouth. "I'm about to conduct a serious medical operation. You'll have to forgive me if I'm a little bit nervous."
"Something tells me that's not what's making you nervous."
"Shut up," I mumble, still looking down. "And lean back. The operation is beginning."
He leans back on his hands. The wound is exactly what he said it was, which annoys me—a graze, a raw red channel maybe four inches long, carved across the flesh above his hip bone. It's stopped actively bleeding. but the whole area is crusted and angry, and it has clearly spent the morning being ground against the waistband of his jeans. It amazes me that he showed no sign of it. I would've been wailing like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
"This is going to sting," I warn, tearing open an antiseptic wipe.
"I don't think I'll be bothered."
"Like, a lot," I insist. "I'm not going to count to three or anything, I'm just gonna?—"
"Caroline. Do it."
Well, if he's gonna berude…
I do it.
He doesn't flinch. That's, like, the least surprising thing ever. I'm pretty sure that if I performed an appendectomy on this man with a grapefruit spoon, he'd ask me to keep it down.
But under my left hand, which is braced flat against his side for stability—which is a legitimate field-medic technique andnotan excuse for physical contact—I feel the muscle tighten, a deep involuntary clench, and something about that reassures me that I'm not the only one feeling a little hot and bothered.
He's alsoliterallyhot, albeit not bothered. He's furnace warm, warm like the fire behind me, and as long as I'm touching him,the savage winter storm that's found its second wind outside doesn't seem so fierce or worrisome anymore.
"You're quiet," Afon observes.
"I'm concentrating."
"You've never been quiet while concentrating. You talked through breakfast. You talked through the kidnapping, probably."
"I'll have you know I was extremely composed during the kidnapping." I reach for the butterfly closures. "I only bit one person."
A strange vibration in my palm alarms me, but only because I don't recognize it at first for what it is: a laugh.
He's actually, audiblylaughing.
Did I do that?!
I keep my eyes on the wound. If I look up at his face right now, I will do something catastrophic, like blush, or say a true thing.
I place the closures one at a time, pinching the edges of the graze together, my fingertips against his skin. Then the gauze pad. Then I'm tearing strips of medical tape with my teeth. To anchor the dressing properly, I have to follow the line of his ribs around toward his back, and that's when my fingers wander across something and stop.
