Page 1 of Ice Around the Edges

I

I HATED hospitals, and having spent the last two weeks in one, I was dying to go home. Not that there was anyone to go home to, but still. The smells, the sounds—I was ready to get the hell out of purgatory. And the wound, under the bandage, was itchy now instead of painful.

“Hey.”

Looking up, I was stunned.

“What?” he groused at me, irritated that fast.

I was speechless. The man who had just walked into my room was my ex, but what made it amazing was that he wasn’t my last one. He was not Ari Klein, who had decided that living with a man who ran a homeless shelter was too much work, and he was not Sean Harris, who I had spent three years with before that. The man I was looking at was Dixon Bain, the very first man I had ever loved, back a million years ago when I was young and stupid and twenty-two. It had begun at eighteen, when we were both freshman in college at the University of Chicago, and ended four years later, when he returned to New York.

“Holy shit,” I managed to get out.

He walked over to the bed, took off the black cashmere and wool overcoat, and draped it over the end. He was wearing a navy blue suit underneath, the epitome of polished and professional. I was thinking he should have been on the cover of GQ.

“Can I sit and talk to you?”

“Course,” I told him, too out of it to do anything but stare at him. I watched him grab the chair that my boss sat in an hour before and move it next to the bed. He sat down facing me. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Dark olive green eyes focused on me.

“Jesus, Dix, what’s it been?”

“Ten years.”

I knew for certain it was at least eight, but I would take his word for it. “And you’re doing what? Just…visiting?”

He cleared his throat. “You know Gwen Dawkins of Peterson Dunbar, don’t you?”

It took me a minute, because really, it had been forever since I’d laid eyes on the man, and I was having just the most surreal moment ever.

“Ev.”

And he was shortening my name like it was normal and expected and still us.

“Um, yeah, she––she’s the community outreach coordinator at PD.”

He nodded, leaning forward. “Well, I don’t know if you know or not, but Peterson Dunbar is an affiliate of Bain Limited.”

I shook my head. “No, I had no idea.”

His eyes were hard to describe, because when you said olive green, people immediately had a vision in their heads of what that looked like. But Dixon’s eyes… his eyes were this clear green mixed with brown, the color of dark khaki but with a sort of simmering intensity in them everyone always noticed. They were unique, just like he was. When I had been spellbound by the man those many years ago, just looking up and finding myself caught in his gaze had made my cock hard. I was very glad that I was swaddled under layers of blankets so he couldn’t see the reaction I was having to him. Some things never changed.

“So.” He cleared his throat. “When Gwen sent an e-mail to her boss saying that she felt a donation in your name to the shelter you ran would be a good idea, sort of a gift for the holidays, I had to sign off on it as my director of charitable contributions is out on maternity leave.”

I nodded.

“I e-mailed her back, asking why we were making a donation in your name, and she explained that she felt it would be a nice gesture, as the shelter would be missing their director for at least a month while you recuperated from getting shot.”

I had the weirdest feeling that I was dreaming. “So you came all the way from New York just to check up on me?”

“Yes.”

I saw how tense he looked. “Why?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“But why would you?”