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He glanced back to me. His hand was still on my leg. Not on the swelling, hot, painful part, but up higher. Like on my thigh. That burning had nothing to do with snake venom.
“A medic?” he repeated.
“In the Army,” I clarified, forcing my attention away from the hand on my thigh.
He blinked a couple times. “No, I wasn’t. We learned basic shit but what I know about rattlesnakes comes from life here.”
Oh. Made sense.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
Confused. Suffering from emotional whiplash. Scared. In pain. Slightly turned on. “I’m doing okay, but I need you to distract me until the doctor gets here,” I said.
He tilted his head, regarding me. “Distract you?”
I nodded. “I’d do better thinking about something else.” Like something that wasn’t his hand on my thigh despite no one being in the room to witness the gesture.
“Did you love him?”
The question caught me off guard, which I guessed was the point. For a second, I couldn’t figure out to whom he was referring. Surely not Kieran. I didn’t peg Duke as a gossip hound. Then it clicked, he wanted to know about the man who I’d been sleeping with who’d I’d also watched die.
Yeah, that made a lot more sense. It also said a lot about me that I hadn’t thought of him much at all since I’d been in Duke’s presence.
“No,” I said truthfully. But that was only after a pause. I considered lying. That would make me look better, wouldn’t it? Not that it mattered. Duke had already made up his mind about me and he didn’t strike me as a man who changed it easily. “We both knew what the score was. Neither of us were interested in anything more than…physical.”
Duke regarded me, face unreadable. I didn’t know if this answer made him like me more or less. Or maybe he was indifferent at this point.
His hand was still on my thigh.
“Have you loved anyone?”
The question hit me square in the chest. My breath caught in my throat. It was a confronting question, bordering on cruel. Because to ask that question, Duke would have to consider me inherently unlovable—or a total psychopath.
“All right, David will be here in five and I intercepted Harriet with the bottle of tequila,” Anna said, entering the room and saving me from the question.
But it had already found its way to my heart, faster than venom.
Thankfully, Duke and I weren’t left alone for the rest of the evening. Tanner and Andrew quickly arrived since the news had somehow spread. Everyone hovered, offered words of encouragement and expressed genuine worry.
I tried to let that bounce off me, the fact this family who barely knew me—and what they knew sure as hell wasn’t the real me—had dropped everything to make sure I was okay.
Which I was, for now.
That’s what the doctor said at least.
He arrived quickly, carrying a weathered leather bag, wearing Levi’s, cowboy boots, and a hat. It shouldn’t have surprised me, considering I had yet to see a man without those accessories since arriving.
He spoke with a gentle, confident cadence that set me at ease. He examined me, and after asking me questions injected some antivenom into my arm.
This was followed by a laundry list of possible side effects and warnings. He was planning to come back tomorrow to check on me.
I had to give the doctor credit, he didn’t ask why I hadn’t been taken to a hospital nor did he give off the impression that he recognized me. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Sure, I was arguably the most famous movie star of the moment, but maybe the man didn’t like movies.
Or so I thought until he left.
“Loved you in Angel Tears, by the way,” he said with a wink, then he left.
The rest of the night was full of Duke asking questions about how I was feeling or barking at me if it looked like I might move from my spot on the sofa.
Harriet did her best to slip me a shot or two but Duke was too observant for me to get more than that.
Instead of having dinner at the large family table in the equally large dining room, everyone founds spots on various sofas, perched their plates on their laps, and ate dinner with me.
It touched me in a way that I couldn’t quite examine—enough to encourage me to eat almost all the pasta and salad given to me. Duke had watched me eat in that same intense way he’d observed the doctor treating me.
The meal was delicious, but I couldn’t enjoy it with Duke’s eyes on me. Something had changed, something big. The bite had triggered his macho-man protective instinct, made him forget about the fact he didn’t like me.
That was dangerous. I had to figure out a way to make him remember.
