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His palm came up to the back of my neck and settled there, warm and heavy, holding me exactly where he wanted me.

“Now,” he said. “Be a good girl and open your mouth for me.” My lips rolled inward before I gritted out,

“I remember the last time you asked me that.” It came out braver than I actually felt, making him grin.

“I bet you do.” His thumb moved once against my neck. “I certainly do,” he told me, making me shiver not just from his admission but because his thumb moved again, slower this time. And I felt him watch the blush as it climbed up my throat, and neither of us pretended he was not enjoying it. Then he leaned in, close enough that I felt the words against my ear rather than heard them.

“In fact, I have thought of little else, so be good for me and give me what I want, little bird.” God help me, I opened my mouth and he fed it to me slowly, in three small bites. And took his time over every one of them. His fingers brushed my bottom lip each time, and each time he waited and watched me swallow before he offered the next. Neither of us said one word through the whole of it.

Then once I had swallowed the last bite, he let his legs drop and his hands came back to my hips.

“Now where were we?” he asked, his gaze dropping to my lips as if asking himself whether they were as sweet as he expected after he had just fed me. Hell, a traitorous part of me wanted to find out, because for all the things he had done to me, he had never once kissed me.

And for two months, I had wondered why.

Then the door started to open, and panic replaced my foolish musing. Because there had been no warning it was about to happen. No knock or call of my name through the door. It just opened, and I came away from that bed and out from between his knees so fast that the clipboard went straight off the tray. My gaze shot to Briggs, who I found standing in the doorway with one hand on the frame.

To be honest, I was half surprised that my ghost let me go. That he simply opened his hands and let me step back out of his reach. Doing so the instant that handle moved and not one second before. Which meant that by the time the door was fully open he was sitting there with his forearm turned up on his knee, waiting patiently for a nurse to finish her job.

“Everything all right in here?” Briggs asked and I was anything but calm.

“F-fine,” I stammered unconvincingly.

“Only you have been in here a while.” He came in a step, which he had absolutely no business doing. “Taking your time with this one, I see.” And then he looked past me at the bed, and I watched Briggs’s face change. It was small. A slight tightening in his jaw before it was gone again.

“Why has he got no shirt on?” The second he said this something in me snapped, because I was no longer the submissive woman doing as I was told. I was the nurse, and this was my room.

I stepped back in toward the bed, close enough to touch him, and laid my fingers along the lower edge of his ribs and pressed gently. The way you do when you are checking for something that was broken once and never set right. I also ignored the shudder I felt under my fingertips as I willingly touched him.

“Because I am checking old injuries,” I said without looking up. “Which is what the physical part of a physical health assessment involves. Does he sound like he is objecting to you?” I asked in a controlled, professional manner and without once looking at Briggs.

“Can you lift your arm for me and tell me if this hurts?” I asked my ‘patient’, and he lifted it obediently, playing his part as smoothly as I was playing mine. But it was at this point that I realized my mistake as I looked at my own hands…

No gloves.

The thought arrived about a second too late, the way the useful ones always do. My bare hand was flat on a patient’s ribs in front of an officer, and there is not one form in that building that has a box to check to explain why.

Despite this, I kept my hand exactly where it was, because taking it away now would have been the most obvious thing I could possibly have done. So, I acted like it was nothing at all, hoping the whole time that Briggs wouldn’t notice. But when Briggs didn’t leave, I looked over my shoulder at him and told him,

“It’s an admission check, they take time. And that door was closed for a reason.” My tone should have said it all but clearly, Briggs didn’t get the hint.

“You sure everything is okay?” he asked and it wasn’t out of concern, I knew that much.

“Yes of course, why wouldn’t it be?”

“Because you only have to say if he’s not behaving like a gentleman.” I swear I felt my whole body go still at that, as the idiot by the door had no idea how close he was about to come to regretting being here. I knew that the second I felt my ghost go deathly still beneath my fingers and I gently caressed his ribs without Briggs seeing, hoping to calm him.

As for the man with a death wish, Briggs smiled at me when he said it and that easy handsome smile he used on everybody had never once worked on me.

And then, from the bed, came a deadly, calm voice,

“The lady says she is fine… now leave.” Everything in that room suddenly seemed suffocating, as if the air had just been sucked out of it by the threat. Briggs turned his head slowly, and I could see him weighing it up. Not whether to answer, but how it would look if he didn’t.

“Shut your mouth, prisoner.”

And that was when he came up off that bed quicker than I could react. Yet he didn’t lunge for Briggs like I expected. He simply stood to his full height, and it was enough to make an impact, and I watched Briggs’s chin come up as he took in the full size of him.

So, I did the only thing I could think to do to defuse the situation. I reached up and put my hand on his shoulder. That was all I did and, in the end, that was all that was needed. My palm flat against his bare shoulder, and he just… stopped.