She opened Tricks’s treat jar. “Want a treat?” she asked rhetorically because Tricks had abandoned him as soon as Bo reached for the jar. She trotted over, eyes bright, and from the corner of her eye Bo saw Morgan hurriedly stuff the rest of the sandwich into his mouth.
She crouched down and gave Tricks the treat as well as a good rub behind her ears and a kiss on top of her head. “Want another?” she called, feeling as if she was offering a treat to the man as well as the dog.
“No, thanks,” he said. “That was enough.”
After collecting the tray and setting the glass of water beside him so he could have a drink if he needed one, she nuked a turkey dinner for herself and ate in silence, sitting at the kitchen bar. Only when she’d finished did she think to ask him if he wanted the TV on.
“Sure,” he said, though he didn’t sound very interested. At least sound, rather than silence, would fill the air. She usually read or watched TV or surfed the web at night, but she didn’t want to sit with him and had already spent enough time today on the computer; she didn’t want to spend more. That left reading, or going up to her bedroom to watch the small TV set she had up there.
But it wasn’t late enough to go to her room; it wasn’t even quite dark yet, given that it was April and daylight savings time had pushed sundown to around eight. The clouds made things darker, and glancing out she saw that a thin layer of snow was on the ground, looking more like frost than snow. “It’s been snowing,” she said, just to make conversation. “Nothing heavy, at least not yet.”
“It’s April.” He scowled at the window. From his seated position he couldn’t see the snow on the ground, but there were a few flakes swirling in the almost-twilight.
“We’ve had snow in April before.” Every April, it seemed, even if it was just a light covering to remind everyone Mother Nature could hammer them at any time.
“I’m from Florida. Snow sucks.”
“I got used to it,” she said. She’d grown up in several different places and hadn’t called any of them home until she’d landed in West Virginia.
The time crept on, and Bo became more and more uncomfortable. She didn’t like having her home, her privacy, invaded by a stranger. She’d deal with it, but she didn’t like it. What little conversation they had was as brief and stilted as the snow conversation. She put on a coat and took Tricks out one last time and came back in to find in that short length of time her guest had gone to sleep.
She took that as a signal to fetch a couple of blankets and a pillow from the guest bedroom. To wake him up, she stood at a safe distance and yelled at the top of her lungs, which sent Tricks into a barking frenzy and definitely woke him up, though without the violent reaction of the first two times.
She helped him make another trip to the bathroom, refilled his water glass, made up the sofa with blankets and pillow, and once he was sitting down she pulled off his boots and set them aside. “Do you want to keep your pants on?” she asked, keeping her tone prosaic. She didn’t care if he took them off or not-she had zero interest in his body-but he might have a preference. “Do you have any pajama bottoms in your duffle?”
“I’ll keep them on,” he said, which in a way answered her question about the pajamas.
She thought a minute, then took out her cell phone and called her landline number. She had both as a redundancy in case of emergency, one of the requirements of the town fathers. She had a phone in the kitchen, and one in her bedroom. As soon as it rang, she disconnected the call, then handed the cell to him. He looked at the phone and back at her. She explained, “If you need me, just call up the last number. I have a phone in my bedroom. That’s if you don’t have your own cell phone-” She stopped. “Do you?”
“I have another burner, in the duffle.”
She shrugged. “I’ll deal with it tomorrow. Just keep mine tonight.”
“What if someone calls you?”
She opened her mouth to tell him that wasn’t likely, then stopped. “Right. It’s snowing, so there’s no telling what some idiot might do on the highway.”
“The phone is in the end zip pocket on the left.”
She got out the phone, identical to the one she’d used to call Axel, and programmed her cell number into it. Then, with a sense of relief, she said good night and bolted with Tricks up the stairs to the privacy of her room.
She hadn’t realized exactly how tense she was until she closed the bedroom door and felt her shoulder muscles relax. She and Tricks were always here by themselves, and it felt wrong to have to work around someone else’s presence. Having him here meant she couldn’t wander downstairs in her underwear to get her first cup of coffee, meant she and Tricks couldn’t have a rousing game of Hide the Ball, meant she had to consider all sorts of demands on her time that she wasn’t used to having. She had to close her bedroom door in her own house, not for her privacy because she knew he wasn’t able to come up the stairs, but to protect him from an inquisitive dog in the middle of the night. She shuddered to think what would happen to Tricks if he was awakened by a cold wet nose shoved into someplace sensitive.
No doubt about it: she’d had all the company she could stand for one day.
CHAPTER 6
MORGAN WOKE AND DIDN’T IMMEDIATELY KNOW WHERE he was; he lay very still, instinctively reaching out with his senses to locate any danger, anything wrong. Then the particular scent of his surroundings registered, and everything clicked into place.
He was at Isabeau Maran’s place. The scent was great, a mixture of wood from the barn structure, the leather of the sofa he lay on, some sort of perfumey stuff in a bowl… what was it… yeah, potpourri. Silly-ass name. But most of all he could smell her. This was her place, and the scent of her was everywhere. He’d gotten up close and personal with that scent when she’d helped him into the house… barn… whatever it was. He’d been so exhausted yesterday that now he’d be hard put to physically describe her, other than attractive, skinny, with long dark hair, but she smelled great-not because she smelled like a woman, which he guessed she did, but because she smelled nothing like disinfectant.
If he never smelled that particular hospital scent again, he’d be deeply grateful. The whole past month was tied up in a nightmare ball of pain, drugs, uncertainty, fear, anger, a disconnect from reality, and he didn’t want to be reminded of it in any way.
He blew out a breath. He needed to take a piss, and the hell of it was he had to assess the situation. He hated it, hated every second of feeling this weak, but it was his new reality. He could make the trip on his own, or he could call her. She’d already had to help him to the bathroom twice; everything in him rebelled at the idea of asking her for help again. It wasn’t as if she were a warm and fuzzy person who made offering aid seem like nothing, the way his nurses had. She seemed to like her dog much better than she did people, which, okay, given that she’d dealt with Mac at any early age wasn’t so unreasonable. He still needed to piss. For a few minutes he lay there dreading the effort it would take to accomplish that simple task, but damned if he was going to call her for help. Even if he had to crawl, he’d get to the bathroom under his own steam.
The house wasn’t dark. The TV was still on, though the sound was turned off because the noise had annoyed the hell out of him. A lot of things annoyed the hell out of him now because nothing was normal. He eased to a sitting position, relieved that the ache in his chest was nothing more than that. Pneumonia had been a bitch; the coughing had nearly killed him figuratively, while the pneumonia had almost done the job literally. He sat for a minute to make sure he wasn’t dizzy, then braced his right hand on the arm of the sofa and levered himself up.