"You look different outside the hospital," he said.
"I'm off the clock."
"I can tell." He picked up his spoon again. "I like it."
I picked up mine.
"Shannon," I said.
I looked right at him when I said it.
He set his spoon down. Looked back at me across the table, easy and in no rush.
“We’ve talked about that,” he said.
“We have.”
“I told you what I go by.”
“I know you did.”
“Every time you say that name,” he said, “you’re going to find out what I do about it.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s a fact.” He said it the same way he said everything he meant.
My thighs pressed together under the table. The space between our bowls was the wrong distance in both directions.
I stood up, took my bowl to the sink, and turned around. He was watching.
I went to my room. My pulse hadn’t settled by the time I hit the light switch.
I needed a plan that wasn’t the obvious one.
Chapter Four
Scorch
I'D BARELY SLEPT.
Not the wound. The wound was manageable. The problem was the woman on the other side of the wall: the sounds of her settling in, then up at midnight for water, then quiet again, and my brain doing what it did in unfamiliar spaces, which was refuse to go dark.
My cock had been running its own agenda since about hour two. The idea of doing something about it had come and gone fast: she was ten feet away, a light sleeper apparently, and that felt like the wrong note to open on. I'd decided to wait her out.
That had been optimistic.
I sat up on the edge of the bed. Spare room, narrow, the neighbor's fence past the glass, early light coming in low and gold. I listened. Down the hall: movement. A cabinet. Running water. She was up.
I pulled on jeans and the black tee and went.
Whitley stood at the counter with her back to me, sleep shorts and a worn tee, dark blonde hair loose all the way downher back. I'd had twenty hours in this house to look at Whitley Stahl. I had every chance I'd gotten. Every bit of her.
I leaned in the doorway. "Morning. Thought I heard you up."
She turned. "There's coffee if you want some."
"Yeah. Please."
