"I timed it yesterday afternoon while you were at the tactical briefing that I wasn't invited to." Her voice carries an edge that could cut glass, and underneath it, a rawness the banter can't cover.
"Boone, my patients are going to be on those machines. My staff is going to be in that room. That facility is my operating theater the same way the field is yours, and you would never let someone plan an operation in your space without your input."
The words land with the accuracy she brings to everything. They land because she's right.
My jaw tightens. My hands are flat on my thighs, fingers spread, pressing against the denim with enough force to whiten the knuckles, because the alternative is letting them do what every instinct in my body is demanding, which is to pick thiswoman up and carry her somewhere the word "takedown" doesn't exist.
The instinct is not rational. It is territorial and primal and runs deeper than eighteen years of discipline, a current underneath the training that wants her locked behind every door I can close between her and the threat.
The names are there, the ones I carry, quiet and permanent. The names taught me that proximity to danger costs, and my body is calculating that cost in real time with Ireland's face in the equation.
Ireland is watching me with the focused attention of a woman who reads bodies for a living.
She can see the processing happening in my jaw, in my hands, and she's giving me room to do it without pushing.
"You're right," I say. The words come out flat, ground through the resistance my body is putting up against my brain.
"The tactical plan needs your input on the facility layout, the equipment vulnerabilities, the patient profiles. You know which patients can be moved quickly and which ones need more time. Rivera's team doesn't have that."
"Rivera's team doesn't even know which breaker panel controls which bank of equipment."
"Then you're in the room." My hands release their grip on my thighs. The concession costs me in a place I don't have language for, and the control required to make it sound calm is immense.
"We build the plan together. Your knowledge of the facility informs the tactical safeguards. You stay in the treatment area with your patients and your staff, and I stay between you and Falk."
"Between me and Falk is exactly where I need you."
"That's not a compliment."
"It's a tactical assessment."
Her mouth curves, just barely, and the fight drains from her shoulders in a single controlled exhale.
"You're the best field medic I've ever worked with. If something goes wrong with the equipment and a patient is hurt, I need your hands in that room. This is about keeping my people safe, Boone. My reasons and your reasons are the same reasons."
The clarity of it strips the disagreement down to what it always was: two people who care about the same outcomes arguing about the method, not the mission.
I cross the room and sit beside her on the couch.
The leather cushion shifts under my weight, and her body lists toward mine with the easy gravity of a woman who has stopped fighting the pull.
"For the record," I say, "the instinct to put you somewhere safe is never going away."
"For the record, I don't need it to go away. I need it to share space with the part of you that knows I'm good at my job."
"Those two parts share space just fine. The part that has trouble is the one that knows what you sound like at two in the morning and can't reconcile that with the image of you in a room where the equipment might be rigged to fail."
Her hand finds my jaw and turns my face toward hers. Her fingers are warm against the stubble I haven't dealt with since yesterday, and the contact hits a nerve that runs straight down my spine and eighteen years of operational discipline has no protocol for.
My cock stirs against my thigh at the brush of her thumb along my jawline, a Pavlovian response to her touch that I stopped being embarrassed about after the first week.
"What I sound like at two in the morning," she says, "is information you acquired through extensive personal research. Are you suggesting that research has compromised your objectivity?"
"I'm suggesting it's compromised my ability to think about anything else when you're in danger."
"Aldridge." Her voice drops, and the warmth in it has an edge that turns the name into something between a reprimand and an invitation.
"That might be the most romantic thing you've ever said to me, and you once wrote a poem that rhymed 'freckle' with 'medical.'"
