eyes opened, but he didn’t move. Except to take her hand with his and press it to his cheek as if he found her touch soothing. “I was unconscious for the better part of a week. Some of it medically induced, some of it not. Thank God I insisted on wearing my plate carrier that day, because I only wound up with a couple of bruised ribs.”
“The plate carrier probably saved your life.”
He finally looked at her. “The doctors said the same thing. It also limited the area of scarring but didn’t do a damn thing to protect against a baseball-sized chunk of cement to the head.”
Annie slid her fingers over the bruise, tracing until they disappeared into his hair. “Where is the scarring?”
“Most of it’s on my back.”
Which explained why she hadn’t seen it that first night. Without having to ask, he tugged the hem of his shirt up and turned his body until she could see his back. She didn’t need to flick on the overhead light. The traffic light had cycled back to red, casting enough of a glow for her to get a good look at the scars. They weren’t from stitches. They were from pellet-sized pieces of concrete spraying his body at a close distance.
A galaxy of craters ran across the right side of his lower back, angry gouging wounds that told a story. Annie didn’t have to try all that hard to fill in the details. She’d seen enough in the ER to piece it all together.
“Emmitt,” she whispered, because he’d been shouldering this all by himself. Never once letting on how much pain she knew he had to be in. Walking to the market, working on the dance, even carrying her through the crowd at the bar must have caused him excruciating pain.
He whispered something back, maybe something sweet, she wasn’t sure. She was too busy running her palm down his side and staring into his eyes. He was doing the staring thing, glancing at her from over his shoulder, his gaze tracing her lips.
It was starting to become inevitable, this thing between them. She could feel it in the air whenever they were within touching distance, growing stronger the longer they were together.
A horn honked behind them and poof, the building intimacy became awkward, and Annie pulled through the intersection.
Clearing her throat, she said, “If your head took even half the force of your back, you need to tell Grayson.”
“No way,” he said, and out of the corner of her eye she watched as he stubbornly crossed his arms across his chest, making his biceps flex. The man was a driving hazard. “He’ll tell Paisley and then she’ll worry, and after Michelle...” He shook his head. “I can’t tell them. Not right now. I need Gray to give me a clean bill of health so I can go back to work.”
“You’ll have to come clean soon. If Grayson gets your records from China before you tell him, he’ll be hurt.”
“He won’t get them. I told the hospital not to release them. I need to be cleared by a doctor before I can finish my piece on the concrete factory. And Gray is too much of a Goody Two-shoes to sign off on me if he knew, so he can’t know yet.”
“Nothing wrong with having a Goody Two-shoes on your side,” she said, wondering why she’d thought being a bad girl would be fun. “And loving someone means trusting them. It’s hard to have one without the other. You’ve made a family with these guys, and family doesn’t keep secrets.”
“Is that your roundabout way of saying that Paisley’s not straight with me because I’m not straight with her?”
“I’m not a parent, and I don’t know the first thing about being one, so I don’t know how much you should tell Paisley. You know her better than I do. But maybe try coming clean on smaller things.” He was looking at her again with those golden brown eyes. “When she asked if she could go to Sammy’s, you could have told her you’d been looking forward to spending tonight with her.”
“I don’t ever want her to feel obligated to hang out with me.”
“Why not?” she asked. “I felt obligated to hang out with my dad every Saturday when he’d take me fishing.”
“You fish?”
“With my dad I do. And stop grinning—it’s our thing. Being obligated to do stuff with your parents is normal at her age. Her pretending to be all put out for having