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“Same guy. Many facets.”
“Huh.” She sighed and looked more serious. “Evan, I know why you ran, but I wish you would listen to me when I say it doesn’t change what I think of you. But I hope telling me unburdened you enough to change what you think of you.”
“Maybe it did.”
This was how it was going to feel from now on, every time I walked into a room with her, knowing she knew my deep, dark secret, feeling terrified and exonerated and overwhelmed all at the same time. Although in the few short hours since we’d discussed it, the edges of those feelings were already softening. And even if they never changed from this moment on, I could handle this. For the payoff of being with her, I could handle it times ten.
“I’m sorry I thought about running,” I said, walking slowly towards her. “And I meant what I said in the tunnel. If you can’t be a one-man woman, I’ll make peace with it. I’ll see you whenever and where ever I can. I thought sharing you would be impossible, and it is, but losing you completely is worse.” I stood next to her now, inches from her soft, warm skin, desperate to touch her.
“Oh.” She nodded slowly, catching up with my brain dump. “That’s... Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
I leaned in and kissed the pulse in her throat, and whispered in her ear, “Can it wait?”
She pressed her hand to my chest. “I don’t think so.”
I stepped back and held her hands while I took deep breaths to check my libido. Yeah, it did jack shit to stop the adrenaline and my hard-on and the clawing need in my gut, but I backed up farther to give her space.
She turned to her desk, unlocked a drawer, and pulled out a piece of paper, which she held out to me. “You need to see this.”
I took the paper from her. “What is it?” I skimmed over it. Names with phone numbers, email addresses, street addresses. “A contact list?”
“Yes. It wasn’t set up like that in my phone, but I dumped them together to print this out, and deleted the list from my phone. I did it this morning, before the mission.”
I shook my head, not understanding. Then one of the names jumped out at me: Chad Waters. I skimmed again, realizing that each person’s name was male and was followed by the tag MD. I dropped the paper like it was a live grenade.
Red caught it. “My roster,” she confirmed. “Like I said, all these contacts are gone from my phone. This is the very last record of them.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “I didn’t ask for their names.”
“That’s not why I did this.” She opened another drawer, pulled out a lighter, and lit the bottom corner of the sheet. She dropped it into the sink.
The flames caught and grew. Then grew some more. The fire wasn’t going to escape the sink, but the smoke was a different matter. I glanced at the silver sprinkler heads embedded in the ceiling.
“Oh!” She turned on the faucet to douse the flames while I pulled off my tee shirt and used it to waft the smoke away from the detector.
“In my fantasy about this moment, there were no smoke detectors,” she said, then covered her laugh with her hand. “It wouldn’t have been so funny if we’d had to evacuate the building.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I stared down at the unburned bits of paper and clumps of ash, realizing what this meant, what she was telling me. I grinned, then laughed with joy as much as humor. “I appreciate the grand gesture, but...”
“It might not have been the safest choice,” she finished.
“Safer isn’t always better. Sometimes you have to take a risk, a leap of faith.”
She took my hand. “Is that what your offer in the tunnel was, your leap of faith?”
“Hmm, partly.” I threaded my fingers in hers and stepped close enough to smell her strawberry-scented shampoo and experienced renifleur all over again. “And partly ego. I assumed the awesome sex would eventually ruin it for you with other men.”
She looked serious. “Consider me ruined.” She placed kisses along my jaw and down the side my throat. “And monogamous. I don’t mean... Only if you... I’m not demanding anything, or...”
I kissed her to stop her babbling, then said, “Don’t worry, I don’t scare that easily.”
“That’s good because...”
The serious look on her face terrified me. My lizard brain immediately flashed to fear, thinking birth control had failed and she was about drop the p-bomb. “You’re not...” I stopped myself from sounding like an idiot in front of my sexy doctor. It would be way too soon for something like that to show up on a test.
“Evan, you’re pale.” She placed her cool palms to my cheeks.
A few deep breaths later, I was back to normal. “Sorry, I don’t know what came over me.”
