Then for good measure, he ran his hand, open-palmed, down the front of his suit, wiping the feel of her off, as if she were covered in goo.
“So why didn’t you ask Tony?” he asked, like he had done nothing bizarre or insulting. “You’re usually a play-by-the-rules type.”
She couldn’t help staring a little longer at the imaginary goo trail on his suit, but managed to answer, “I’m not a type.”
In the time he’d been gone, she’d managed to build a little callus over the strips of flesh she felt carved off, but it was eggshell-thin. Almost an illusion. Maybe completely an illusion.
It was a lot of work to keep her emotions at bay with him there. The whole time he’d been gone, she’d been outside of the expectations of anyone who knew her—Jordan and Zeke were in the field, too—and she hadn’t known how to react to anything, except that one core feeling of loss and grief. She didn’t even know whether to be irritated by the emails with her consultants, or patient with them repeatedly questioning her decisions. But in that moment with him, it was perfectly clear. What she wanted to do was shout at him. To lash out, make him feel as bad as that one little motion made her feel. But she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“I didn’t ask because I didn’t want help. Also, I only decided after my last patient that I needed to do it.”
He stood back a little, his eyes sharpening. “Are we on winter hours now?” He nodded through the door to the dark lobby.
“People have already started going home, and there were a number of medical staff out in the field.”
“And you didn’t want to wait until tomorrow,” he filled in.
“Somehow I wasn’t enthused with the idea of having one more thing on my mind all night.”
A single nod was the answer and he asked, “Want me to do it?”
“If you can stand touching me.”
The careful quiet way he’d been looking at her sharpened, then with one hand he cupped her cheek and leaned forward, urging her to meet him.
Her heart squeezed, but the thundering settled into a gentler gallop when he tilted his head and pressed a warm, slow kiss to her temple, where he lingered and softly spoke, “Don’t do that. That’s not what that was.”
Another painful squeeze to her chest, and the gallop accelerated, but she lost track of her pulse in the tingling that radiated from wherever he touched her, and it came again, that stinging in her eyes she hated. A simple touch to remind her of what she’d lost.
When he let go and stepped back, his expression was softer, but his lips twitched before he made a comically exaggerated show of wiping his mouth on his sleeve, and then wiping his hand on her trousers, right down the thigh.
A little laugh puffed from her and she swatted his hand away, smiling over the dewiness in her eyes.
“Tell me what this is for.” He nodded to the pale green stoppered vacuum tube, as if he needed to ask. He knew what panels were run on that particular tube, the preservatives at the end that varied by tube color—and, given their location, which test was most likely the one she was going for. He might lead in with the charm she’d thought frozen dead when he’d come to Fletcher, but he was still going to make her say it.
“I had a patient with Polar T3 symptoms, and decided that I might need another check on my thyroid, too.”
He made some sound of affirmation, then began lightly prodding her one good vein, and still seeing no signs that she’d so much as grazed the sucker with her errant needle driving, he opened another needle, found the vein again, swabbed and then slipped it right in.
A minute later, it was over and she had a cotton ball bandage to stop the bleeding as he left for the lab room to get it started.
“I can take it from here.” She followed him out, crooking her arm to apply pressure to the site.
“You’re not treating yourself.”
“It’s not treatment, it’s just a test,” she argued. “And I’ll be doing it for myself when everyone is gone.”
“And if you already have dropping levels?”
She sighed, checked her stick location to make sure it wasn’t oozing and then let her arm relax. “Cross that bridge when I get to it. You just got back from a long trip, you’re tired.”
“I’m fine to run this.”
“Damn it, West, I don’t want your help. I could’ve gone to my legs or something to get the blood—it was just easier to let you do it. Running the equipment isn’t going to be affected by it being my own blood. I can do it just like I’d do for anyone else.”
“Don’t care,” he grunted. “Better start thinking of the reasons you’re going to give me as to why you felt the need to do another thyroid check six days after you had one.”
“I know the reasons. That’s enough.”
He logged the samples while the machine got to work, turned to look at her. “Are you having trouble sleepin’?”
“No,” she said swiftly, then shrugged. “A little.”
“Mood swings?”
That was the one that got her, her absolute lack of emotional control the past several days. One minute she’d been glad West was gone, the next she was worried about him in the field. Not worried about Jordan, who wouldn’t be back until the day before the big boa viagem. But West she’d worried about, and kind of hated him for that.
“I’m taking silence for yes.”
“Yes.” She echoed the word just so he’d stop looking at her like she couldn’t take care of herself—she’d basically been looking after herself since she’d been released from her luxurious Portuguese penitentiary to the strange freedom of an exclusive girls’ school in the States at sixteen. Not to mention her years at medical school, where she’d met Jordan, and then when they’d moved to London to work in the same hospital, where Lia had met West. “Mood issues are probably to be expected after all of this, don’t you think?”
“Aye,” he said softly, not rising to her bait.
“Still, I’d rather find out if it’s physical or emotional as early as possible. And in case I’m just being paranoid, I didn’t want to tell Tony. He’s overwintering, too, will be the only other doctor here with me, and I don’t want him to think I’m unstable or a hypochondriac, or that he should in any way doubt my abilities.”
“Why would he doubt your abilities?” He unzipped the top of his snowsuit, proof that he’d just arrived back from their trip, and pulled it down to pool at his waist, baring his double layers of thermals. Because he’d basically been camping in subzero temperatures for several days.
“Why wouldn’t he? Seems to be coming from several directions in my life right now. Personal fronts. Professional fronts. All my local foremen don’t think it’s right that a woman should have to run Monterrosa Wine. My father spent my whole life telling me I wouldn’t inherit, but apparently changed his mind right before he left for parts unknown.”
“Unknown? He’s still gone?”
She nodded once, then checked to make sure the tiny puncture was no longer oozing, then slapped some tape over the cotton ball and rolled down her sleeve.
Change the subject.
“Did you sleep at all when you were out there?”
He nodded, but didn’t answer out loud. He also didn’t budge from the spot in front of the buzzing machine.
“And the cold?”
“There’s a two-room building at the site—they go back to it every year. Has a stove and emergency supplies.” He answered that probably because it was easier than all this emotional garbage. “No beds. Not meant for overnight stays. We’d have been back same day but for a storm that sprang up. Ended up glad for the emergency sleeping bags, even while we all slept on counters or the floor.”
And he’d slept in those conditions. Amazing after him not having slept at all the night before he’d left, after their Awesome Talk. She’d barely slept, and he’
d somehow managed to pace in a room with about two square meters of walkable space. The only proof she really had that he was still upset to see her, or upset in general. Might be about the mysterious something that sent him running to Antarctica, for all she knew.
Part of why she’d been glad to find his goodbye note hanging on her doorknob the next morning, if one could call a bag full of tiny candles that, or the scrap of paper that said, For the heater while I’m gone.
And he’d be truly gone soon. No matter how raw she still felt, she didn’t want to spend the next few days bickering with him, or giving him an itemized list of all the wrongs he’d contributed to, leaving the way he did. He knew it had been the cruelest way to leave her; nothing she could say would make it as real for him as it was for her. She was the one...who shouldn’t be in love anymore, but was having a hard time turning that off.
“Thanks for the blood draw,” she said, because just telling him that she wasn’t going to feel her feelings in a loud, outside-the-brain way anymore with him seemed weird. “If the levels are off, would you...slip the results under my door or something?”
“I’ll come tell you,” he said, and just as she’d nodded and turned to go, he said, “I don’t doubt your ability or your worth. I’m sorry about your da’.”
“Thanks,” she said again, the only word she could think to say, and then hurried out. Food. Sleep. Maybe tonight was the night she’d crack open one of the two bottles of the family’s finest vintages she’d swiped from the cellar before leaving. Seemed like a good night to force herself to sleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
LAST NIGHT HE’D made Lia Monterrosa smile at him, and every time he’d seen her today that had been all he’d been able to think about. Those brief seconds when her hazel eyes had warmed and his chest had filled with honey, thick and sweet, had been there all the time. Even in the smallest measurements, when they were midquarrel.
West stepped out of the line with his dinner tray, and seeing as the only tables with available seating held Lia—who was distracted and bent over her mobile phone—and Gates—who had the charisma of a dead rodent—he invited himself to sit with her.
Not that he should be so stupid, but that voice of pragmatism and self-preservation was getting quieter daily, and fading into the echo of how peaceful it had been to love her.
But even when his day trip had turned into three days and hundreds of miles had separated them she’d been on his mind.
“Do you mind?” he asked, placing his tray across the long narrow table from her.
Lia lifted her grumpy face—a look he recognized—but shook her head. “They say every twelve hours it passes over, and I thought that meant seven and nineteen, but here it is, ten minutes after and no signal.”
Satellite. One of the difficulties with Antarctica was moving there as a modern, urban human who’d grown used to easy access to the internet, Wi-Fi, mobile services...getting used to the change was hard. They only really got emails twice a day, unless the sender and receiver were both quick and focused enough to send and receive multiple emails within the forty-five or so minutes they had on each pass of the uplink.
“Waiting for an email?”
“Several. Manager. Consultants. Investigator. My father...” She grimaced lightly at the last.
He hadn’t asked last night more questions after she’d confirmed that the man was still in the wind, but with this opening... “He’s answering emails?”
“No. I just keep sending them.” She put her device down and reached for her fork. “I meant the private investigators I’ve hired to try and track him down.”
“They have news?”
She stopped eating, fork still in her mouth, the soft, pink slickness of her lower lip pressing to gently swell between the tines, her eyes wide and fixed on him.
“You don’t have to talk about it. I was just making conversation.” He shrugged, looked at her mouth again, dragged his gaze away, dropped to the table as other thoughts began swimming into his mind. Good thoughts. Wickedly good thoughts.
“You just never wanted to talk about that stuff.”
True. Sort of. When it had been a danger that she’d start prodding around in things he didn’t really want her knowing. “Did you sleep better knowing your T3 levels are fine?”
She watched him so closely that pragmatic voice turned a little paranoid, convinced she could see every prurient thought dancing across his mind just from the way he’d lamely fixated on her mouth.
After a weighty silence, she cautiously said, “I slept better than I would’ve had I been preoccupied with it.” And then, “But I would’ve slept better still if there hadn’t been a caged lion bunking next door, pacing.”
West frowned at the idea they kept one another awake, then more deeply when he remembered the ways they’d once helped one another sleep. “I wasn’t pacing.”
And even if she’d just put off a vibe of not wanting to discuss things... “You were, but then you left the room and paced up and down the corridor for about a half an hour, where you probably growled and swiped at the air.”
Demonstrably and adorably, she curled one hand like an ineffective claw and acted it out, swiping her paw while curling her upper lip into an exaggerated snarl.
He found himself smiling, that old chemistry still there. It had never needed too much prompting in the past. Affection he wanted to last, pretend that everything else wasn’t there between them, no matter how stupid. Fall back into old habits before rings and tux fittings. “And you just laid there and listened?”
The phone momentarily forgotten, she still smiled, but as she watched him and considered her words, it began to diminish, growing smaller and then rueful.
“I laid there and worried actually.” She waved one hand, as if to dismiss her own right to be worried. “Maybe you need to have your T3 checked.”
The moment had passed, too hard for either of them to hold on to, and thrust them right back into spiky emotion territory, where neither knew what to do with any of it.
“I had it done the other day. This winter you should have Tony do yours. Keep up with it.”
“I will. There was a grandparent with thyroid problems, I think. Of course, I could be misremembering. It’s not as if my parents talked much with me about...well, you know.”
“I know?” he repeated, and then shook his head. “Remind me.”
“Anything besides studies and expectations? Then my mother died, and it was mostly about all the ways I disappointed by not having a penis.”
It was the perfect opening for him to make a flirty joke, but he swallowed it down with his starchy meat stuff, which resembled what someone might think shepherd’s pie was like, if they’d never eaten shepherd’s pie, and only heard of it in stories.
The same way he knew about her parents, small scraps of information because he’d always wanted to look forward, to keep her looking forward. He didn’t want to tell her about his mother, with her brassy, bottle-blond hair and too-red lips, or the last time he and Charlie had seen her. The neglect Lia seemed to have suffered was different, but still something they could’ve bonded over.
Just then, her phone pinged, then pinged again, over and over as emails began hitting her in-box. Her attention zeroed in there, reading and responding to emails, and not eating enough of her dinner. That he could legitimately comment on for her benefit.
“You need to eat more. People who overwinter tend to front-load the calories and try to put on some weight in the early part of the winter, because the last couple months are lean and it’s better to have some cushion you can lose.”
“I’ll eat when I’m done,” she said, but had clearly retreated from the conversation.
* * *
“Hey, you lot!” a man called from the double doors leading out of the galley. Lia and everyone else stopped talking, stopped eating, and heads swiveled in u
nison toward the man shouting for attention. “First aurora spotted on the horizon. Get your asses out there if you want to see them before you go home.”
Aurora! The perfect timely reminder of the adventure she’d hoped to have. Or at least an experience she wouldn’t have back in Portugal. The future stepping in when she was in danger of forgetting what they were now. Forgetting that it was never going back to the way things were with silly playfulness. Forgetting that, according to him, things had never been that way to begin with.
In danger of falling under the spell of old desires, the hope that things could turn around with them. Every time they shared a smile, it punched through her defenses, even punched through her exceedingly legitimate anger at him. Weakened her.
He obviously felt it, too, the wall she’d reconstructed, as he took a final bite and stood up before he’d even swallowed it. But before he went to return the tray, he stopped to say, “You should go see them, but come back and finish dinner after.”
Still on about her eating after he’d done his best to wipe her appetite from existence.
As she stared at the tiny words on her screen, her desire to do the responsible thing wavered for once. She wanted to see the sky.
When she didn’t respond to his nag to eat, West took his tray and left, grumbling beneath his breath as he went. Something else new about the bearded man, or just another fissure in the usually perfectly polished appearance and persona of the man she’d known. And she wouldn’t let that feel like progress with him, even if she would have months ago when that had been her primary aim: get closer without driving the man who never spoke of his past away for badgering him about his past. Fat lot of good that had done.
If she just popped out for a minute, she could see the sky, and then come back inside, answer the most urgent emails before the satellite moved out of range and get the rest loaded to send the next temporary internet zone in twelve hours. She hadn’t looked at the four emails that had popped up, but had looked long enough to confirm that none of them were from her father, then went about finishing the first one she’d started.
Reunited in the Snow Page 5