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He had thought of every plan I hadn’t yet had a chance to make.

“So, all of this… this is just because you want me to be your nurse?” I asked even though I knew the answer.

“You can believe that if it helps you sleep.” He almost smiled. “But you know the truth.”

“Do I?” I mocked angrily, because he was right. I did know the truth and that was what scared me the most.

“You have known it since that shower.” I made myself stand up straight. Somewhere under all of it there was still a woman who had spent three years refusing to let a man watch her flinch, and she awakened in me now.

“What do you expect to happen here?” I asked, my tone far more confident than I felt.

“Really. Because this isn’t Ashlock. You have been in this building two days. You don’t have the guards, you don’t have the warden, and you don’t have a doctor in your pocket. You don’t own this place.”

He came toward me then and he did it slowly. He also didn’t stop until there was perhaps an inch of air left between us. To the point where I had to tip my head all the way back just to keep my eyes on his. And even then, I was looking up at him like someone standing at the bottom of a well.

“No,” he said softly before forcing reality to finally sink in as he told me…

“But I do own you.”

28

BEDSIDE MANNER

ANNA

“No… but I do own you.”

Everything in me wanted to argue with that.

But the problem was that he had just spent the last ten minutes taking every single thing I might have argued with away from me… so I said nothing at all.

“Which means that you will do exactly as I tell you," he stated like his word was law and, in his mind, I guess it was. As for me, my mind was still trying to play out every escape plan I could think of, with every single one of them falling apart before I finished it.

“So, with that being said, let me explain exactly how this is going to go.” He straightened up off me and stepped back. Then the coldness in his gaze faded and his voice lost that hardness before becoming pleasant again. Which I was quickly learning was the most frightening thing about him. That switch in him that could flip in a heartbeat.

“What I want from you is very simple. You will carry out your duties exactly as you would for any other patient on this ward. You will not arouse suspicion, you will not behave strangely, and you will not be seen to be frightened of me. Because frightened nurses get reassigned and I haven’t gone to all this trouble just to be handed over to somebody else.” And there it was. He hadn’t just thought about how to get to me.

He had thought about how to keep me.

Right down to the way I reacted in the corridor, and how I presented myself to my peers. Meaning that I quickly understood that every single thing I did from now on was going to be something he had already accounted for.

“Is that it?” I asked bitterly and he smirked at that.

“Not even close,” he said, keeping the grin in place, and I hated how handsome it made him.

“And what does that mean exactly?”

“It means a request will be made for you to spend more time with me.” He said it lightly, as though he were suggesting a change to a schedule. “On the grounds that it will assist my treatment.”

“By who?” I asked with a little shake of my head, trying to make sense of it, as the last thing I needed was to spend even more time with him. Christ, at this rate I would have been better off staying at the prison.

“By you,” he told me and honestly, I just stared at him. I think my mouth even opened a little at one point, but nothing made it past my lips.

“You will go to your senior,” he continued and in the tone of a man who was reading something out that had already been agreed to and signed. “You will explain that your new patient doesn’t engage with male staff, but you have managed to establish a rapport with him, and that in your professional judgment extended one-to-one sessions would be… beneficial.” The pause before that last word was deliberate and so was the way he watched my face while he said it.

“Beneficial to you maybe,” I snapped, but he just shrugged his shoulders at this and once again, I hated how I noticed the way it pulled the material tight over his muscles.

“Why?” It came out of me almost as a laugh, a horrible one, and it wobbled in the middle. “Why would you even…”