Page 46 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"I'm assessing."

"Assess anything good?"

"Swelling's down." I set the basin on the nightstand. "In the leg."

His mouth does the almost-smile. I have a sudden, detailed thought about that mouth and where I'd let it go, and I file it under symptoms I am not charting.

"I could've managed in the shower," he says.

"You can't stand on that leg for eight minutes, and I am not scraping two hundred pounds of stubborn off my bathroom tile. Bedside bath. Sit still and behave."

"Which one? Can't do both."

"Owen."

He lifts his arms. Surrender. It does criminal things to his stomach and he knows it.

I start with his back, because his back is the safe side. This is my first clinical error of the evening.

Broad. Scarred along one shoulder blade, an old burn gone shiny. The washcloth moves and the muscle shifts under it, alive, and my brain, unsupervised, puts my mouth on that scar. Follows the water down. Two seconds of that. Then I fire the thought and go back to work.

He's gone still. Not the relaxed kind. The kind where a man is counting things in his head to stay civilized.

Good. Count faster than me.

Water runs the channel of his spine and disappears under his waistband, and I watch it go the whole way down, which is not a nursing requirement.

I wring the cloth. My knuckles graze the back of his neck and his breath catches, one rough notch, and heat drops straight through me and lands low. Noted, I think. Bilateral response.

"You're quiet," he says.

"I'm working."

"You're never quiet when you're working. You're quiet when you're thinking."

"Lean back, Peterson."

He leans back on his hands, easy, taking up my whole bed like he owns it, and front is worse.

Collarbone. The chain against his sternum, and I work around it without touching it, and he watches me not touch it. His eyes stay on my face while my hands are on his chest, and there is nowhere professional left to look.

His heart slams under my palm. Elevated, I note. Mine's worse.

I drag the cloth down his chest, over his ribs, and somewhere along the way it stops being the cloth. It's my hand, flat against his stomach, water running between my fingers, and the muscle jumps hard under my palm and his fists close in my quilt.

"Cold?" I ask.

"No." Gravel. "Not cold."

I should take my hand back. I move it lower instead, one inch, tracking the water into the low line of those shorts. Those shorts are doing a poor job of keeping his opinion on this bath to themselves, and I look. I look, and when I drag my eyes back up, he's caught me, and he doesn't say a word. His jaw is tight enough to crack. His knuckles have gone white in the quilt.

"Nellie." Low. A warning or a request, and I don't think he knows which.

"Almost done." My voice comes out wrong. Too bright. Nurse-voice with a fracture line in it.

I kneel for the calf, which puts me on the floor between his knees, which I did not think through, which is my second clinical error of the evening.

The cloth moves up from his ankle. Calf. The inside of his knee. His breathing has gone slow and deliberate, a man doing box breaths, losing. Heat comes off his skin like he's still standing next to a fire. My thighs press together and it helps nothing.