“No caffeine with a concussion.”
“You know concussion protocol.”
“I know a lot of protocols.” He turned back to the stove. I knew there was a story in that sentence, in the flat way he said it, but I didn’t ask. I sipped my tea and added it to the pile of things I was going to figure out about this man.
“I’m going to figure you out,” I told him. Apparently out loud. The concussion was reallydoing a number on my filter.
“You’re not going to figure me out,” he said, cracking eggs into a pan.
“I figured out the smile already.”
He went still. Which, I’d already learned, was something in itself. “Amy.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m not reading into it.” A pause. “Barely.”
He put a plate of scrambled eggs and toast in front of me and stood there like a wall.
“Eat.”
“You’re unbelievably bossy.”
“Eat all of it.”
I ate. It was good — eggs done soft, toast done dark, the cooking of a man who’d made ten thousand quiet meals for one — and I was hungrier than I’d known, which he’d clearly known before I did, which was becoming a theme. Also becoming a theme? Being ordered around by a man built like a barn and liking it. Somewhere in my body a committee had been formed to discuss that development. The findings were unanimous and unprintable.
He took the chair across from me. The full width of the coffee table between us. Like the furniture had been assigned to a security detail.
I set my fork down on an empty plate and looked at him. “So now what?”
“You need to rest.”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to rest.”
“No. You weren’t supposed to rest without someone watching over you.”
I looked at him. Big and still in a chair he barely fit in, watching me right back like there wasn’t anywhere else he needed to be.
“Are you going to watch over me?”
“Yes,” he said. “I am.”
CHAPTER FOUR
GARRICK
She fell asleep mid-sentence.
One minute she was ranking every documentary that had ever lied to her about nature — which was a surprising amount — and the next, her words simply stopped. Her head tipped against the back of the couch. The mug sat cradled loose in her hands, and I crossed the room and took it before it could end up in her lap, and she didn’t so much as stir.
I stood there holding a mug. Watching her.
I shouldn’t have. I should’ve killed the lamp, taken the chair, done the job Jared had volunteered me for. Watch and observe. Instead, I stood there like a man who’d forgotten what he was doing, and I looked.
Asleep, all that motion went out of her, but there was a crease between her brows even in sleep, like some part of her was still arguing with that river.
The hands that never stopped moving when she talked lay open. She’d rolled the sleeves of the flannel shirt into thick cuffs at her wrists but one had come loose, swallowing her hand to the fingertips.
My flannel. She was wrapped in something I’d worn against my own skin a hundred times, and that fact ran a slow lapthrough my blood waking something inside. The voice started whispering.
