“Your flank has sutures in it.”
He spread his hands, the reasonable man. “I’m not going anywhere. Just the window.” He tilted his head and the drawl went warmer, more direct. “Listen. I’m the Road Captain of a motorcycle club. Three-club rally in four days. Run logistics go through me. I’ve got a prospect who wants to handle the ride-out and that cannot be allowed to happen. I can rest just as well in my own bed in Bandera as I can here. I’ll sign whatever says I understand the risks.”
“You’d reopen the repair before you hit the parking garage.”
“I’d be careful.”
“You were one leg out a fourth-floor window sixteen hours post-surgery.”
He considered that. He was actually listening, which was more than some patients gave me, and there was something under what he was doing when he listened: something more considered, less automatic, closer to the man under the road name. Then the easy one came back.
“You could come with me,” he said. “To the rally. Hill Country in May: live music, good brisket, good people. I know everybody. You’d be taken care of.” He tilted his head, and something in the dark eyes went more curious than easy. “How long have you been working city trauma? You grew up in the Hill Country, didn’t you?”
“I grew up outside Boerne.”
“I can hear it.” His voice had eased, the drawl settling into something more real. “I grew up outside Bandera. Hill Country’s in my blood. You can’t tell me it’s not in yours too.” He held my gaze, steady, the easy manner dialed sideways into something that was actually about me. “Come out for one weekend. See it again.”
I returned to the chart.
He watched me write for a moment. “You’re not going to smile at that either,” he said, not quite a question, more a mannoting something he found genuinely interesting. “Not even a little one.”
“Get in the bed, Mr. Dodd.”
“You don’t have to stand in the doorway.” He spread his hands, easy. “Come on, sweetheart.”
He said it with that particular warm deliberate ease, the way men said it when they expected it to land. The full Texas drawl, slow and unhurried. Watching me with the dark eyes and the smile that had probably worked every single time before this one, and all the patience of someone who’d never yet met a no that had stuck.
I looked up from the chart.
“Shannon,” I said. Low and even.
He went still.
Not the small freeze from the doorway. This was different—deeper, settled, down through his whole frame. A predator’s stillness, right at the decision point. His eyes went flat and dark, the smile gone like it had never been there, and the voice that came out was not the easy warmth at all. It was low and private and had edges.
“Don’t,” he said.
My breath caught, just one beat before my face moved.
A beat of silence in the room.
“Everyone calls me Scorch.” Each word laid down separately. “I expect you to, too.”
Heat climbed the back of my throat and went straight to my cheekbones, my fair skin telling on me the way it always did whether I wanted it to or not. Lower than that, my thighs pressed together under my scrubs and I was standing six feet from his hospital bed at the end of a twelve-hour shift and there was absolutely no reason for any of what my body was doing right now.
I showed him none of it. Not one line.
“Scorch,” I said, flat and even. “Get in the bed.”
He got in the bed.
I HAD HIS IV SITE,his blood pressure, and his suture line to check. Standard post-op on a day-one admit, nothing that should have taken more than six minutes. I pulled on my gloves. He watched me cross the room and folded his arms across his chest with the deliberate compliance of someone who’d agreed to the rules for now.
I started at the IV site. Bruising from the first placement, normal.
“You read the chart,” he said. “The whole thing.”
“I always do.”
