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Instant paralysis seemed to flood through her. She stopped rolling dough into bite-sized balls, her hands buried deep in something that smelled a lot like peanut butter. Three seconds passed. Four. Her exhale brushed against the underside of his jaw.
Jocelyn took as big of a step back as she could with her palms full of dough. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry.” He knew better than to touch her without permission. Cold infused his veins as he brushed his thumb against his slacks. They were already spotted with blood. A few more drops wouldn’t hurt. “You just...had a bit of blood on you.”
“Don’t. Just...don’t.” Lean muscle running the length of her arms flexed and receded as she peeled layers of dough off her hands and tossed it back into the bowl.
Right before she sprinted from the kitchen.
Chapter Four
No amount of cookie dough was going to fix this.
Jocelyn scrubbed her hands as hard as she could beneath the scalding water. She could still feel his touch at the corner of her mouth. Baker’s touch. It’d been calloused and soft at the same time, depending on which feeling she wanted to focus on. Only problem was she didn’t actually want to focus on any of it.
Her skin protested each swipe of the loofa. To the point it’d turned a bright red. The blisters she’d earned this morning were bleeding again, but it wasn’t enough to make her stop. The dough just wouldn’t come off. She could still feel it. Still feel Baker’s thumb pressed against her skin.
“Jocelyn?” Movement registered in the mirror behind her. Baker centered himself over her shoulder though ensured to keep his distance. Dark circles embedded beneath his eyes, taking the defiance and intensity she was used to right out of him.
She ordered one hand to turn off the water, but she just kept scrubbing, trying to replace one feeling with another. It was working. Slowly. The tightness in her chest was letting go. “How did you get in here?”
“That guy Cash told me where your room was. I knocked, but there was no answer. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” His voice didn’t hold the same authority it had while he’d been asking her about the bombing in Ponderosa.
“So you thought you would just let yourself in?” The conversation was helping, somehow easing her heart rate back into normal limits.
“I knocked for fifteen minutes,” he said. “Listen... I’m sorry about before. I shouldn’t have touched you. I was out of line, and it won’t happen again. I give you my word.”
Her hands were burning, and the last few pieces of agitation slipped free. She finally had enough control to turn off the water. All was right with the world. Jocelyn reached for the pretty hand towel to her left and took a solid full breath for the first time in minutes. “I’m not crazy.”
Three distinguished lines between his eyebrows deepened as she caught his reflection in the mirror. “That didn’t even cross my mind. A lot of soldiers have trouble differentiating the past trauma from the present. I’ve seen it in one of my deputies. There’s no shame—”
“I’m not suffering from PTSD, Baker.” She rearranged the hand towel back on its round metal hardware. No one understood. Because what she’d done—what she lived with every day—was hers alone. But what she wouldn’t give to let someone else take the weight for a while.
Jocelyn turned to face him, the bathroom doorframe putting them on opposite sides of the divide. Here and outside these walls. “You want to know why I bake so many cookies and breads and cakes and pies? Why I feel safer with a glob of dough in my hands than with my sidearm? Because it makes me happy. It helps me forget.”
“Forget what?” He moved toward her then, resurrecting that hint of smoke in his uniform.
Discomfort alienated the pleasure she’d found with her hands in that peanut butter dough. She’d already let her control slip once today. Did she really want to take a full dive into trusting a man who couldn’t even stand to be in the same room as her? “My husband.”
“Oh.” His expression went smooth as he leaned against the doorjamb. “I didn’t realize you’re married.”
“Was. I was married.” She’d never said the words before, never wanted to admit there was this gaping hole inside of her where Miles used to be. Because that would be when the sadness got to be too much. When the world tore straight out from under her and past comforts reared their ugly little heads. “He passed away about a year ago.”
“I’m sorry.” Folding his arms over his chest, Baker looked as though he belonged. Not just here in headquarters but in this moment. “I didn’t... I didn’t know.”
“Nobody knows. No one but you.” She let her words fill the space between them, but the weight didn’t get lighter. If anything, her legs threatened to collapse in the too-small bathroom attached to her room.
Eyes to the floor, Baker scrubbed a hand down his face. “So when I touched you—”
“It wasn’t your fault.” She crossed her feet in front of her, her weight leveraged against the vanity. Of all the places she’d imagined having this conversation, in a bathroom with the Alpine Valley’s chief of police hadn’t even made the list. “The most affection I get now days is from Maverick, and he’s not as cuddly as he looks. You just...took me by surprise is all.”
“As cuddly as he looks? Your dog nearly took my hand off when I was trying to get you out of the station.”
His attempt to lighten the mood worked to a degree. But there was still a matter of this...wedge between them. One she wasn’t sure she could fix with cookies and a positive attitude. “A spouse isn’t usually someone you want to forget.”
“It’s not him I want to forget, really.” She tried to put her smile back in place, feeling it fail. Her fingers bit into the underside of the vanity counter, needing something—anything—to keep her from slipping back into an empty headspace she didn’t want to visit. “He died of cancer. While I was on my last tour. I tried to make it home—to be there for him, you know—but communications on assignment were spotty at best and arranging transport is hard when the enemy is shooting down anything they come across.”
Tears broke through. The pain was cresting, sucking her under little by little, and she had nothing and no one to hold on to.
