She gave a little hum of agreement, and they sat in peaceful silence. After a few minutes, the motion-sensor lights from surrounding properties extinguished. Stars seemed to wink into existence then, suddenly much more visible in the velvety darkness. At the foot of their mountain, Hollywood sparkled in the distance.
Stars above, stars below.
“I told you about the job I almost walked away from.” Angling his body toward her, he studied her face upturned to the sky. “You owe me, you tight-lipped vault of a woman.”
At that, she lowered her chin, meeting his eyes. “What, precisely, do you think I owe you, Woodroe?”
There was tolerant fondness in that gaze, in that voice, and he wanted to wallow in it.
“Tell me why you left the hospital.” It was ostensibly an order. A challenge. But even he could hear the hint of a plea beneath the bluster. “Why leave a good job to work for someone likeRon?”
He infused her cousin’s name with all the loathing it deserved, because he couldn’t seem to get over it. The bastard hadn’t even asked how Lauren was doing after she got body-slammed by that asshole on the red carpet. Notonce.
Her hesitation strained his limited patience, but he held steady, stayed silent, and received his just reward after several fraught seconds.
“Well, first of all, I want to be absolutely clear that I didn’t leave the hospital in order to work for Ron.” Her mouth pursed slightly, as if she’d tasted something sour. “I’d planned a month-long vacation in Spain and Portugal, and my mom convinced me to visit him at the beginning of my trip. I was going to head over to Barcelona that Tuesday, only …”
Only then, Alex’s bar fight had happened, and she’d been recruited as his minder.
The thought boggled him.
One day. One more day, and she’d have left. One more day, and he’d never have met her.
His shirt was damp, and the night was getting colder, and he shivered.
Her brow pinched as she studied him, and he preempted what she was about to say. “Don’t try to get out of this by claiming I’m too cold to keep talking. Pay your debt, Nanny Clegg. Why did you leave the hospital?”
She stretched out those short, cute legs, braced her hands by her hips on the granite bench, and looked up to the sky again.
“I made it thirteen years,” she said, her voice so low he could barely hear her. “Longer than any of the other emergency services clinicians who started around the same time as me. I was considered the old lady of my department before I left.”
While still in her late thirties? Jesus.
“The schedule was hard. Some weeks, I worked seventy hours, and I was on call a lot. The pay was good, though, especially with all the overtime, and I liked the camaraderie.” She lifted a shoulder. “I usually took the overnight shift and worked holidays, because I didn’t have a partner or kids to come home to. It was the only fair thing to do.”
He couldn’t help it. He groaned out loud, because holy fucking Christ, she was the fuckingworst.
“What?” The heat of her glare was impressive, really, especially for such a self-sacrificingidiot.
He sighed dramatically. “Nothing. Go on.”
After one more irritated glance, she did. “Anyway, it was tiring. But that wasn’t why I left. Not really.”
The instincts that had made her shove him aside on the red carpet had been honed in the ER, she’d said. People would getagitated,she’d said.
He drew the natural conclusion. “It was the violence?”
In what seemed to be an unconscious gesture, she touched the crooked bridge of her nose, and now he knew. Some asshole in the ER had broken it.
Motherfucker. He needed to climb a thousand more steps. A million, to work off all this rage.
To his surprise, she shook her head. “It wasn’t the violence.”
He narrowed his eyes at her suspiciously, and she huffed out a little laugh.
“I mean, yes, people could get violent sometimes. Mostly they’d just insult you, but sometimes they’d throw stuff. Once in a while, they’d throw punches too, but security could handle that.”
She sounded so damncalmabout it all. Unruffled, as if that kind of abuse didn’t take a toll eventually. As if her safety didn’t matter.
