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“I’m not a child.”
“No, you’re my patient,” she said evenly. “And I’d say the same thing to anyone under my medical care. Don’t get worked up about it.”
“Didn’t I tell you to get Tony to help you if you needed anything for the guest house?”
“Yes, but I didn’t want to bother him for a few eggs and some bread,” she said. “I would have sent him to the store in a few days like you told me to. But this morning I wanted to make French toast. Is that such a big deal? You told me I could get things from the kitchen.”
“In the future, ask Tony, please,” he said.
“Now I can’t even get eggs?”
“I mean.” He looked pointedly at the floor. “It doesn’t seem like you can.”
She sighed. “I wouldn’t ordinarily have dropped them. I was startled. But I cleaned up the mess. That won’t happen again.”
It wasn’t about the mess. It was about the fact that his own breakfast was late now because she had been in the way. But he didn’t want to spend his morning explaining that to her.
And he had just become aware that he was wearing his bathrobe. It wasn’t something he usually thought about, walking around his house, but now here was this woman he had slept with, this woman he was trying to maintain a professional relationship with—no, he couldn’t have her in the main house when she wasn’t expected. It wouldn’t work.
“Go back to the guest cottage,” he told her. “I’ll have someone bring over what you need for French toast.”
Amy crossed her arms. “You could say please.”
“Please.” He wasn’t about to split hairs with her. If saying please got her moving, he would do it.
She rolled her eyes at him. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll be back at noon. But we’re going to have to talk about this.”
“Oh, are we?”
“If you’ve got some kind of idea about where I can and can’t go on the property, you’re going to have to spell it out specifically,” she informed him. “Otherwise, you really can’t get angry with me for being places you don’t expect me to be.”
There was a part of him that knew she was right about that. He didn’t want to admit it, though, so he just turned away from her.
Before they spoke again, he would make sure he knew exactly what he expected from her in the future, and he would lay it out for her so that there would be no more incidents like this one.
* * *
He was waiting in his office when she arrived for their meeting later that afternoon. He’d dressed in one of his nicest suits, hoping to erase from Amy’s mind the image of him in his bathrobe. It had occurred to him that she might get the idea that he was weak in some way—that he was letting his illness prevent him from getting dressed each day. It wasn’t like that, and she needed to know it. She needed to know that he was still living life. He needed her to be ready to fight for his life, and to know how hard he was going to fight for it.
She took her seat and spoke before he could. “I need access to the kitchen,” she said. “And I need the code to the gate. Those things are non-negotiable if I’m going to stay here.”
He stared at her. “You don’t give orders in my house. Especially not to me.”
“I’m not giving you orders. I’m telling you what’s going to have to happen if I’m going to stay here. If you want me to stay, give me the gate code. If you don’t want to give me the code, that’s your business, and I’ll respect that, but I’m not going to live somewhere I can’t leave and return to whenever I want.”
“Fine,” he snapped. “It’s five-four-zero-eight-three.”
She nodded as if she had known all along that he would give in, and it infuriated him. “Thank you,” she said.
“Aren’t you going to write it down?”
“No. You’re pretty particular about your security. I can see that. You might not be comfortable having it written down. I can remember it.”
He almost wished shehadtried to write it down. It would be easier to stay angry with her if she wasn’t being so reasonable.
“All right,” she said. “Those are my only requests, for the time being.”
“You might have more later, then?”
