Page 28 of Break For Me
He doesn't look at my face. He looks at my hand, my arm, the medical data points. I am a chart to him this morning. A set of vitals and wound margins. He’s rebuilt the clinical wall, every brick perfectly in place, the mortar set hard.
Good. Fine. Two can play this avoidance game. I can be as cold as he is.
Except I can’t. Because the memory of his hands on my naked body is sitting right there, filling the small room between us. Pretending it doesn't exist would require a level of sophistication I have never possessed.
"You enjoyed that."
The words come out flat and hard. I throw them the way I throw a punch—from the hip, no windup. I watch his face for the flinch. I want to see a crack in the wall. I want any evidence that what happened in this room affected him the way it affected me.
His hands pause over the gauze he’s unwinding from my palm. One beat. Then they resume their work.
"I lowered your temperature from thirty-nine point eight to thirty-eight point two using a standard evaporative cooling protocol," he says. He sounds like a medical textbook. "Thephysiological response you experienced is a documented side effect of tactile stimulation during febrile states. It occurs in approximately fifteen percent of male patients and has no?—"
"I don’t want a percentage," I cut him off. "I want you to look at me."
He stops unwinding the gauze. His jaw tightens, the masseter muscle leaping under his pale skin. He lifts his eyes and meets mine. What I see behind those lenses isn’t shame. It isn't arousal or the flustered heat I wanted to provoke.
It’s patience. Cold, measured, infinite patience. He’s been accused of worse by worse people. He survived by never giving them an inch to hold.
"I performed a medical procedure," he says, his voice like ice. "That is all that happened in this room."
"That’s not all that happened. You saw me. You touched me."
"It is all that happened that is clinically relevant," he clarifies. He holds my gaze for three long seconds. I count them, the way I know he counts them. Everything between us is measured in controlled intervals now. "Would you like me to change your dressing, or would you prefer to have this conversation until the wound gets infected again and I have to amputate your hand?"
I want to hit something. The wall. The cot frame. His perfect, composed, arrogant face. I want to smash that clinical architecture of his until I find whatever’s hiding underneath—the man who shook in my truck, the man who sat outside my door all night, the man who pressed a wet, cool cloth against my burning skin with hands that didn't tremble until the very end.
I extend my left hand toward him. I don't say another word.
He unwraps the dressing. His long fingers work the gauze with the same steady, mechanical efficiency. He doesn't look at me again. I sit there with my ruined hand in the hands of a man who saw me at my lowest and filed it away under "irrelevant." The shame in my gut curdles into pure, hot anger.
Anger is better. Anger is a weight I know how to carry.
He finishes taping the fresh gauze. He sets my hand on my knee.
"Eat," he orders. "Take the antibiotic. I’ll check on you in?—"
The bedroom door bangs open violently.
Garrett fills the frame. He’s holding the shotgun, the stock braced against his hip. His face has the compressed, hard tension of a man delivering bad news on a short timeline.
"We’ve got company."
I’m on my feet before the second word fully lands. The room tilts violently. I grab the doorframe with my right hand and ride out the vertigo until the wooden floor stabilizes beneath my feet.
"What kind of company?" I grunt.
"Drone. Small rotary, commercial grade. I spotted it over the tree line twenty minutes ago making a precise grid pattern. It’s not a hobbyist. The flight path is systematic. Someone’s mapping the property."
The Russians.
The blond I left alive in the hallway—I should have killed him. I should have put a round through his skull instead of pistol-whipping him, because unconscious men always wake up, and they always talk.
"How long do we have?"
"If the drone is their advance element, the ground team is probably staging within a few miles. Could be an hour. Could be less."
I push past him into the main room. Killian is lying on the door, the IV still running into his arm. His color is better than it was, but his color is still grey-yellow—too much blood loss, not enough time. His eyes are closed. His breathing is a shallow, rhythmic rasp. The dressing on his abdomen is clean. Adrian’s work is holding.
