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Mattie swung her head round, saw him running beside her
and slowly—reluctantly, he thought—pulled her earphones out of her ears.
‘I thought you’d be in the gym.’
‘I’ve always preferred running.’ He shrugged, then frowned. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t know...the muscles.’
She flushed as she said it, the tell she’d been trying to hide. The giveaway that she’d paid him more attention than she wanted to admit to—thinking of him the way he’d been thinking of her. Kane barely supressed a grin.
‘That’s just genuine physical work,’ he told her. ‘No hours of weights in the gym.’
At least out here they were safe. Safe to talk in privacy, but also safe that it wasn’t intimate. Nothing could happen.
‘If the offer is still on the table for the MERT ride-along, I’d like to see that.’
‘What changed your mind?’
He couldn’t tell whether she was hacked off or happy about it and, for some reason, that got under his skin.
‘I figured it could only help me to know what to focus on for my guys if I saw for myself how their packaging of the casualties affects your team.’
It was a valid reason, and one he certainly should have in the forefront of his mind. If was just a shame that the main reason started with Spending more time and ended on with Mattie.
Even the thought of her was helping to elevate his temperature, and as much as he’d like to blame it on the run, he couldn’t. With an irritated grumble, Kane hauled off his running tee and tucked it into the rear waistband of his shorts.
‘Do you really need to take that off?’
‘Sorry?’ He turned to look at her, assuming that this was her idea of a joke, getting him back for earlier.
Instead, he realised that her expression was deadly serious, and slightly anguished.
She wanted him, too.
‘I do,’ he replied with nonchalance.
If she wanted his chest covered, she could always order him to do it. He’d spent years thinking he’d lost her and missing her in a way he’d never dreamed possible. Now it was Mattie’s turn to wonder at things that might have been.
The fact that she didn’t told him everything he needed to know. Instead, they ran in quiet companionship together. Their step and their breathing reaching an easy harmony.
‘It’s so quiet,’ he observed after a while.
‘Peaceful,’ agreed Mattie. ‘And beautiful. Like those flowers over there. Whatever they are.’
He followed the direction of her gaze.
‘Lupins.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The flowers. They’re lupins.’
He couldn’t help smiling as her head swivelled around, knowing what she was about to say even before she said it.
‘I read it.’
‘You read it?’
