Page 197 of A Vicious Love

Her eyes sharpened faintly. “No doctor.”

“Yes doctor.”

“Jamison—”

“No.”

Her brows drew together, a little stubbornness. “I don’t need one.”

Her lips parted.

Then, impossibly, she gave the tiniest laugh. Like I was ridiculous. I stared at her like an idiot. She seemed to realize she had laughed and looked down quickly.

No.

Absolutely not.

I caught her chin gently and lifted her face back to mine.

“Don’t hide that.” I loosened my fingers immediately, but she didn’t pull away this time.

Progress.

My thumb brushed the edge of her jaw, careful over wet skin. “I thought I lost you.”

Her face softened with confusion again.

“Jamison,” she whispered.

I leaned in before I could stop myself and kissed her cheek. Harder than I meant to. My lips pressed to her, and I breathed her in with the kind of relief that made a man understand why people prayed.

“Fuck,” I muttered against her. “Fuck, baby. You scared you.”

I kissed her cheek again, softer this time, and brushed her wet hair back from her face, my hand still too careful for a man like me.

My heart kicked hard. I looked at her fingers suspended between us.

“Go on,” I said, voice rough.

Her eyes flicked to mine.

“It’s okay.”

Her cold fingertips touched my jaw. The old instinct would have been to control the contact. Catch her wrist. Decide what it meant before it could mean too much.

Her fingers slid along the line of my jaw.

Her brow pinched. “Your hand is bleeding.”

I looked down. One of the rocks had cut my palm when I hauled us up. Blood thinned in the water running over, my knuckles.

“I don’t like it.” Sienna’s attention locked on it. I turned my hand away immediately. Such a simple sentence. I swallowed against something rough in my throat.

Then she shivered, hard. That snapped me back into function.

“Right. Up.”

Her expression panicked. “I can walk.”