“Actually, smart mouth, you do,” I drawled. I reached around her shoulder and poked my finger into the wound. The blood was dry, but I’d been mandated by the universe—no better way to qualify my heart, soul, and mind—to care for her in every way possible.
“Yowwww! That’s a good one this time. I think your new nickname should be Jaws.”
“Like the villain in James Bond?” I preened.
“No, like the giant fish.” She laughed at her own joke, making me laugh in return.
“Pfffft. You loved it.”
“True.”
“Hop up.” I smacked her bare ass. “Sit here in my chair, gorgeous girl, so I can clean it up. I’d feel terrible if it got infected.”
“Infected?” While the word clearly startled her, she recovered quickly enough to mutter as she complied, “Yeah, who knows where your mouth has been lately.”
Well, that did it.
I swiveled the chair around to make her face me and then leaned down until I was directly in her line of sight. “Just so we’re clear, Miss Mathews: my mouth hasn’t been anywhere since the last time it was on your delectable flesh. Do you understand me?” I dipped in even lower, until our mouths were just breaths apart. “It’s you, Taylor. Just you. Now and always.”
She swallowed, once more exposing her heart and then covering it right back up—as I fucking looked on. What the hell was I going to do about this? Perhaps what every good doctor could. Teach by example.
“Okay, okay,” she finally groused, pushing hard on my shoulders—but I stood my ground, refusing to budge. “Come on, Mac. Let me up.”
“Not on your fucking life.”
She rolled her eyes, which damn near had me lifting her up to deliver more swats. But she saved her own backside—literally—by uttering, “Let’s not be making hasty promises in the afterglow of sex. That’s just bad form, and we both know it.”
She tried to turn the chair away from me, but I stopped its progress with a commanding grip on one of the armrests. “There’s nothing fucking ‘hasty’ about this, woman.” With my other hand, I gripped her cheek. “I love you, Taylor.”
Her lips parted as she fervently studied my face. “Mac—”
“Uh-uh,” I butted in, tunneling my hand into her hair. “My turn. You will listen. I love you, damn it. And I realized, a moment too late, that I’ve loved you from the first time we met. At this point, I’m not convinced I didn’t love you in another life too.”
“Mac!”
“I’m not done yet. And yeah, I know this is the part where you like to tuck tail and run, but I’m not letting you do that anymore either.” I prodded at her scalp, making her head jog back to lock the oceans of her eyes with the resolution in mine. “We’re done hiding from the hard stuff.”
And still, the temptress summoned the cheek to roll out a seductive smile. “Well, thank God, because I love your hard stuff.”
“No,” I ordered at once, catching her by the wrist of the hand she reached down with, aiming to snag me by the crotch. “No. Give me more.”
She quirked a brow. “Greedy. You just had quite a lot of me.”
“You know what I mean.” I worked my thumb up, circling it into the middle of her palm. “Tell me you love me too. I know you do. You know you do. That pin dick you had lunch with even knows it.”
At once, her other brow leapt up too. “Pin dick?” She laughed.
“I’d bet a Benji on it. Not that you’ll be finding out, though. Ever.”
She returned her brows to normal, funneling my attention to the new lights in her eyes. The ones she didn’t want me to see. Those sky-blue glints, betraying how deeply my caveman act truly touched her. Not that she’d let me on to that anytime soon.
“Shit.” She pouted. “You can’t just order me to tell you I love you and make it so.”
I pushed my thumb in harder. “Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t work like that!”
“Why not?”
“Oh, my God.” She swung her face to the side, as if expecting to find one of her gal-pals waiting to lend commiseration. How little she really knew. If Claire, Margaux, or Talia were really standing here, they’d be doing so with a tapping toe and a censuring glare for their friend. They liked me. At least I thought so. What wasn’t there to like?
“All right, so what did I expect here?” she went on, half to herself. “I’m talking to a clown.”
“You can try to cover this up with all the sarcasm in your sexy-as-fuck brain, baby—but it’s not going to change this. It’s not going to alter what’s going on between us. I will not let you go again.”
She huffed. Canted her head around enough to shoot me half a glance of vexation. “I heard you the first thousand times.”
“Glad you finally listened. Now turn around and let me heal you.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” She smacked her forehead with a loud crack. “Did you really just say that?”
I let my silence be her answer for an extended minute. The better part of another. At last I murmured, “Doctors used to be called healers by their villagers, you know.” I was almost done with my gentle cleaning of the blood, lingering longer than I actually needed to so I wouldn’t have to face my fears now—and watch her walk out of my office. Always wondering if it would be the last time. Always holding my breath, thinking she might never come back.
Linger.
Linger.
I swallowed, attempting to regulate my staccato heartbeat, before asking conversationally, “So…what are you doing this weekend? Maybe we can do something.” No way could I control the hopeful—dear fuck, even desperate—lilt to my tone.
When was the last time a woman made me feel this way?
The answer, from one of the secret corners of my soul, was terrifying.
Never.
“Let’s…ummm…play it by ear.” Taylor was being noncommittal, and I knew it was on purpose.
But I was much more determined to hold my ground, even if she was planning to drop the hammer on my dreams.
“Not good enough.” I crossed my arms over my chest. I couldn’t let down my guard against this woman and her power of determination once she set her fiery spirit on something.
“Well, it’s the best I can do.” And then she shrugged as if she didn’t have a care in the world—even for me.
Crap.
“You can always make other plans, and I’d understand,” she said. Another shrug—driving in her point worse than the first.
“Why are you doing this?” I applied some antibiotic ointment to her bite and then covered it with a large Band-Aid. The second I was finished, she pushed to her feet and then crossed to where her T-shirt lay on the floor.
“Why am I doing what, exactly?” With a couple of graceful swoops, she pulled the thing over her head.
“You seriously don’t know?” I challenged. “Because you don’t have this shit down to a fucking science, woman?”
She ran a hand through her hair, attempting to shake out the tangles. Fucking goddess. “You’re the science man, Doc. Enlighten me.”