by Caro Carson
She might as well go for broke and add wife to the mix. “How was your day at work?”
He stood abruptly and walked a pace into the dark.
She twisted her fingers a bit as she remained on the edge of the patio, watching him. “That bad, huh?”
He turned to look up at her. The soft light illuminated his harsh expression. “I can’t talk about specific patients.”
“Did somebody die, maybe?”
He shook his head, but it had to have been something almost as bad. The worst thing she’d witnessed in the emergency room had been the violent threats from Mr. Burns to his wife.
That’s it. She’d seen Alex with this sharp edge to him once before, in the kitchen in the ER.
“You had to treat another woman like Mrs. Burns,” she said quietly.
Alex didn’t shake his head.
She passionately hated all the misery domestic violence caused. The horror was the worst for the victim, of course, but the effect rippled outward, affecting children and extended family—and the medical personnel who had to deal with the aftermath.
“I’m so sorry. I know you’re imagining the best outcome for your patient.” Grace felt a hot anger that Alex had to endure that emotional wringer. “At least we’ll get that for real with Mr. Burns. I’m telling you, I hope he doesn’t take a plea deal. I want to go to his trial. I can’t wait to get called to the witness stand.”
“No.” In one stride, Alex came to stand below her, so intense that he grabbed her hips, his fingers firm through the denim. “I don’t want you anywhere near that son of a bitch. If you get called to testify, you tell me. Immediately. Do you understand?”
“Alex.” Her heart beat hard at how fiercely protective he was being. He must care for her. He must.
“Burns won’t touch you. Not you.” His face was inches from her stomach, his hands gripping her hips firmly, and she felt the tension in his every muscle as she set her hands on his shoulders.
She had a second moment of intuition. “It was actually Mrs. Burns again, wasn’t it?”
Alex bowed his head. He pressed his forehead to her middle, a moment of intimacy that made her catch her breath. He breathed, too, one strong, swift breath, then another.
Grace clutched his shoulders, then jumped off the ledge to land in the darkness with him. She wanted to be the one to soothe him, but it was he who held her protectively, tucking her head against his shoulder, setting his cheek on her hair—and then, he very gently opened his arms, and stepped away.
She felt a little cold, a little confused. “I’m sorry the happy ending you imagined for her didn’t come true.”
Alex tucked his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and took another step away from the house. “Everything may still turn out okay for her. It’s not that unusual to get pulled back in. Some women get away the second time. Or the third. But they still get away.”
“I told you when I first met you that you were an optimist, do you remember?”
He spared her a small smile. He didn’t believe her.
Grace tried again. “I’ll bet Mrs. Burns was glad you were the doctor on duty. She didn’t have to explain anything or try to find a way to speak to someone alone.”
“One of us is an optimist, Grace. I think it’s you.” He kept his hands in his pockets when she wished he would hold her again.
“You don’t think she was relieved you were her doctor again?”
There was a beat of silence, barely enough to make her wonder if he was going to answer her.
But he did. “I think she was embarrassed. I know my mother was, when she had to get stitches. Strong women think it shouldn’t happen to them, perhaps.” He shrugged, as if he hadn’t just told her something momentous.
“Your mother? You lived through that as a child?” She’d thought she’d gotten all the important facts during their little interviews. He had no siblings. His parents were divorced. He and his mother had moved from Russia to America when he was fourteen.
None of that was important.
“It only turned physical that last year. There were a few years of tension before that. When the Soviet Union fell apart, so did my parents’ marriage. There was an opportunity for the average person to have more say in government, but it was risky. My mother thought it was worth the risk. My father didn’t. The arguments escalated every time my mother was jailed. The government was more of a threat to my mother than my father was, but looking back, I think we were escaping both.”
When Grace had written down the facts of his youth in her notebook, she’d admired his ability to complete high school in the usual four years despite knowing almost no English the first year.
She’d admired the wrong thing.
“Clark Kent.” She sighed the words into the night.
He automatically moved to push up his glasses, but he wasn’t wearing them, so he dropped his hand and frowned at her instead.
“It was what I thought when I first saw you. You weren’t in awe of my sister. You weren’t afraid of Mr. Burns. You even came to the hotel so I wouldn’t be intimidated by the police into...into taking an unnecessary risk. Oh, Alex. Thank you.”
She took a step toward him. She was dying to touch him. He’d just held her so protectively, but now he seemed so far away.
“Clark Kent isn’t far off, is it? You step in to help a lot of people. I am sorry that you’re so good at identifying spouse abuse because you witnessed it, though.”
“All ER doctors are trained to look for the signs.” He put his boot on the ledge and stepped back up to the patio. He turned and offered her his hand to give her a boost up, as well, then smoothly slipped his hand free of hers.
“It must bring up bad memories.”
He was silent.
“What do you usually do, when you’re home alone after a bad shift?”
“Brood for a little longer, maybe. You snapped me out of it sooner. Thanks.”
Something was off here. He was too calm. Too fully recovered when she could still feel where his fingers had dug into the denim waistband of her jeans.
He nodded toward her laptop. “Did you come out here to work?”
She had little choice but to go along with the change of subject. Her crutch had become his. She couldn’t drag him back out into the dark.
“It’s sort of a thank-you gift for this week.” She opened the computer’s lid and waited as the screen, too bright in the dark, displayed the first page of her project. “Do you remember that first day when we bought the rocks?”
The day you kissed me like I was the oxygen you needed to breathe?
But there was no sign of that emotion now. No more fierce protectiveness, either. Just...friendliness. Didn’t Superman always turn a car right-side up and then fly off alone?
“The manager gave you a couple of extra bags of gravel when he found out what they were for. It started me thinking. If you set up a nonprofit for your landscaping projects, you’d make it easier for a business like that to donate supplies. This is just some brainstorming, but I looked into it, and setting up a nonprofit wouldn’t be that complicated.”
“Just brainstorming?” He sank into the chair, eyes on the screen as she scrolled down to the table of contents.
“There are grants you’d be eligible for, too. I listed some of them here.”
He took over, paging through the mission statement she’d composed, the links to the legal requirements, the proposals she’d written for initial and future workflow. He said nothing until he’d scrolled all the way to the appendix, where she’d created sample spreadsheets he could use for tracking finances and labor.
“This was all inspired by a free bag of rocks?”
“The manager really liked what you were doing. So did I.”
Alex nodded, bu
t that harshness had returned to his expression—something about the set of his jaw. “This is what you were doing all those evenings you supposedly weren’t working. This is an entire business plan, Grace. We pay people at the hospital to put together grant proposals that aren’t as complete as this.”
“It’s not a big deal,” she said, although she wasn’t sure why she felt defensive. “I’ve never had so much free time. You made sure I didn’t work more than nine hours a day, and Sophia stayed in one place for an entire week. This wasn’t hard to do.”
He shut the lid to the laptop and stood, his physical presence both familiar and intimidating at once. “This takes skill. Don’t devalue yourself. Ever.”
She fought a shiver. “You keep saying things like that. Like I’m not easily replaced, and I shouldn’t let anyone tell me I am. Who said that? Sophia? Martina?”
“You did.”
She froze.
Then his calm words started an avalanche of words in her mind. I’m just doing my job. Why would anyone want to know about me? She could hire a hundred different people to be her assistant.
Grace felt as light-headed as she did when she skipped a meal. He touched her as he had in the hotel, a firm hand on her upper arm, lending her balance, the touch of a doctor.
His voice was more intimate. “If you could see what I see when I look at you... I want you to believe in yourself. I want to be able to imagine you confident. Please. Be happy.”
The unspoken words were loud enough: when you’re gone. She felt another chill that had nothing to do with the cool night. I want to imagine you confident when you’re gone. Be happy when you’re gone.
He couldn’t let her go, never to be seen again. Ten minutes ago, he’d pressed his face into her middle, swearing no harm would come to her. He cared about her.
“I don’t want you to imagine me at all. I’m not your patient. We can stay in touch.” Grace was no heroine in a movie, but she’d learned this week that she was more courageous than she’d given herself credit for. She dared to touch him, placing one palm on his hard chest, not caring if he could feel the tremor in her hand.
“How long before you go?” The bass in his voice resonated through the palm of her hand.
“We leave for the airport right after you dance with Sophia.”
He winced. For one second, one precious second, she saw that the loss of her meant so much to him that it caused him pain. The next second, his expression was polite, controlled. That poker face was in place, the one he hadn’t been using when it was just the two of them.
“The problem is Deezee,” she said. “He’s coming to Austin, so Sophia is getting out. She’s scared to run into him.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you?”
She knew with certainty that if she said yes, he would keep her by his side until she felt safe, but she couldn’t lie. “Not anymore. There’s nothing Deezee can do to hurt me.”
“He could come between you and your sister again.”
“He can only do that if Sophia lets him. And if she does, I’ll be okay without her. I’ll still love her, even if she makes a dumb choice.”
His scrutiny gave way to a ghost of a smile. “I hope it never comes to that. You and your sister belong together.” He let go of her arm and turned toward the house.
He was leaving. She’d just told him this was their last night together, and he was leaving. They were friends, nothing more. Maybe not even that much.
“Wait.” Beating down a sense of panic, she scrambled to remember her plan. Her prop. Her crutch—the nonprofit information—she opened the laptop again. “I need your email address. I’ll send the business plan to you. And then...and then you could appoint me to the board. There only needs to be three of us. I’ll be your secretary. Between the phone and email, it would be no problem at all for me to do the bookkeeping and get grant applications ready, even when I’m out of state.”
And I’ll have an excuse to call you when I want to hear your voice.
“No.”
She felt all the air go out of her chest. Out of her world.
“I’m sorry, Grace, but no. I don’t want to continue on that way. Not being together, but not falling completely out of touch, just in case our paths cross again.”
Tears stung her eyes and clogged her throat. He didn’t want to stay in touch with her, not at all. They weren’t really friends.
“It’s what you were thinking, wasn’t it? Maybe you’ll be back next year for South-by. Maybe your sister will come back to film a sequel to whatever she filmed here last September. Maybe...” He set his hands on his hips and looked out at the dark garden, shaking that perfectly cut hair back from his perfectly blue eyes. “Maybe Burns will go to trial, and we’ll catch dinner while you’re in town. I don’t do that, Grace. I can’t be on call for you. I’m not that man.”
“Then what man are you?”
“Not the kind that dates the personal assistant of a movie star.”
That sounded so final. She was the sister of a movie star. She couldn’t change that. “I thought you and Sophia were teasing each other, mostly. Do you really not like her?”
Do you hate my sister the way Deezee hates me?
She had his attention, at least. He looked from the dark back to her, mildly surprised. “I’ve got a newfound respect for her this week, actually. She’s chosen a difficult career, but she’s loyal to you. That’s the most important thing.”
Wrong. Having more time with you is the most important thing. But she wasn’t quite enough of a superhero to say such a thing.
“So if it’s not the movie star, then it’s me. The girl with no friends. The girl who’s afraid to say her sister’s name in public. I know that’s not normal.”
But he was shaking his head. “I’m no judge of normal. You and your sister were together during the toughest time of your life, and now you’re never apart. My mother and I were together during the toughest time of our lives, and we hardly see each other. Which of us is normal, Grace? You get your stability from another human being, at least. I spend my time with rocks.”
“You spend your time making beautiful gardens for people.”
“Ah, Grace. Milost’.”
He touched her, smoothing his hand over her hair. She couldn’t mock herself for being so hyperaware as he touched her hair, for she felt it as acutely as if he’d slid his hand over her breast.
He’s going to kiss me.
His gaze moved from her hair to her mouth, but he didn’t lean in, didn’t give in, to what she knew he wanted. She waited, anticipating, but his look of want was replaced by that poker face once more.
“We should get some sleep,” he said, dropping his hand to his side, all business now. “What time in the morning are the first people—”
She silenced him with her kiss, her mouth, desperate to erase that neutral expression and snap that calm control. His lips were warm and surprisingly soft and seriously strong. It was so wonderful, such a relief to be kissing the man she’d been so attuned to all week, that it took her long, blissful moments before she realized that while he was kissing her back, he wasn’t taking over. He wasn’t letting the kiss take over, either. He allowed nothing to burn out of control—it was nothing like that kiss by the truck.
She became aware of this as she became aware that she was nearly on her toes, pressed against him, her soft chest against his harder one, her hands once more clutching his shoulders.
His hands weren’t on her.
She ended the kiss and stood solidly on her feet once more.
“I thought... I thought I meant more to you.” Grace knew, somewhere in her objective mind, that she ought to feel embarrassed. But Alex was so calm, so unaffected, that she felt a little bitter. “You said everything you did this week was to help me. You said you had my back.”<
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“I’m still backing you up. I’ll be spending all day tomorrow backing you up.”
“Until I get on that plane. Then that’s it, isn’t it?”
Her heart broke as he nodded.
The bitterness became huge. “I didn’t realize your friendship had an expiration date.”
“I always knew you were leaving in a week. You knew it, too, Grace. That’s why we never let anything go too far.”
“We didn’t? We? Did you really think I didn’t want to kiss you every single day?” Tears stung her eyes, born of embarrassment that he hadn’t been swept away by her kiss—or perhaps the tears were simply because it hurt to hear him say he’d never planned to see her after this week. Or perhaps it was worse than that.
Perhaps she was in love.
Tears fell. The man she loved was going to walk out of her life.
How puny all her wishes this week had been, wasted on wanting to stay away from LA, wasted on wanting a dumb DJ to leave her alone, as if geography and her sister’s affairs mattered as much as Alex. She loved him, but he was leaving her.
I wish you loved me, too.
Alex pushed her hair away from her face, his warm hand lingering on her cheek. “You started this week by saying it was a mistake when we kissed. I thought you were being smart. We won’t miss what we’ve never had.”
“But we don’t have to miss each other. I can visit you here. You can fly out to California.”
“For what? To spend a day or two together?” His hand stayed gentle but the look in his eyes turned almost angry. “Some sex, a few dinners. A long weekend here, a holiday there. It’s not enough, Grace. It’s going to be hell watching you disappear tomorrow. Don’t ask me to live through a dozen more disappearances in the future. I meant it when I said I’m not that man.”
“Then I don’t know what to do,” she said, closing her eyes against the intensity in his, “because you’re the only man for me.”
The silence was electric, then his hand on her cheek was cupping the back of her head instead, pulling her close as he kissed her, hungry this time. Starving. His arm came around her as he opened her mouth with his own, and the slide of his tongue made her whimper with pleasure. He was delicious. He kissed her as if she were delicious, and she felt herself melting with each slow, strong taste. She held on to his arms, felt his muscles bunching as he slid his hand over her backside, lifting her higher against his hard body. The intimacy of their kiss, the sure touch of his hands—everything between them was so gloriously hot in the cold night.