there was something else definitely going on here.
“Jake,” she said in a voice that trembled with warning. “I—”
He touched her then—touched her for the first time in eleven years—putting a hand on an arm bared by the short-sleeved, snug tee she wore. A strong sense of awareness, a flash of heat at the skin-to-skin contact, zipped through him before she yanked away.
“Vivvie, tell me what’s going on—”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped, her eyes blazing. “You don’t get to call me that anymore. Ever.”
“All right. All right.” He put some space between them on the small platform, holding up two hands—but he also made sure he was positioned so she couldn’t get past him to the ladder and escape. Not yet. “I won’t touch you. Won’t call you anything but Vivien or VL. Or would you prefer Miss Savage?”
And that was when it occurred to him it might not be Miss Savage any longer. And something hard and heavy clunked into his gut.
“Vivien is fine.” Her voice was clipped. “Now, for the last time—”
“Who put that there?” He decided there would be no more beating around the bush. Direct hits only from now on, because the entirety of their interactions since he’d first seen her again had been a series of dances—circling about, tap-dancing around their past and whatever was going on in the present.
It seemed to be the right approach, for she wilted a little. “I don’t know.” There was still a bite in her tone, but at least she’d given him an answer.
“Tell me what’s going on,” he said, and when she stiffened, preparing another runaround, he added, “Look, it’s obviously new—so someone put it there recently. What’s the deal? I have a right to know, since my father’s going to be coming here regularly.” The last bit he threw in there as a Hail Mary play, but it seemed to work.
She wilted a little more, but responded firmly, “All right, you’ve got a point, but there’s no reason to think anyone’s in any sort of danger. It’s just—I don’t know, some sort of practical joke, I guess.”
“That piece of bridge fell—”
“Catwalk.”
“Catwalk, then, fine—it fell, and if someone had been walking on it, that might have been a tragedy—”
“No one would have been walking on it without testing it out first, like I did,” she said flatly. “If you’re suggesting that it was sabotaged—”
“I don’t know whether it was—or at least I didn’t even think it might have been sabotaged until I saw that over there.” He jerked his thumb toward the GO OR DIE backdrop. “But that sort of puts things into a whole different light, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” She shook her head and rubbed her temples with one hand—a strikingly familiar gesture of frustration and likely an encroaching headache.
“I want to examine it to see whether it was, well, sabotaged,” he said.
“So, what, you’re a detective now, Dr. DeRiccio? Wasn’t med school enough of a career for you?”
Caught by surprise at her use of his title, he couldn’t hold back a grin. “You know how much I liked to watch Criminal Minds and CSI.”
She folded her arms over her middle, which happened to draw his eyes to the pair of very fine breasts that he remembered far too well. “That doesn’t make you qualified to examine anything.”
His heart bumped a little when he noticed the tiniest tug at the corner of her mouth, like she was almost going to smile. That was the first time she’d looked at him with anything other than contempt or dislike.
“Still. I’d like to take a gander, all right? Look, Vivien, obviously something’s going on here, and it’s not pleasant. Even aside from the fact that my pop’s going to be here—along with a slew of other people—it worries me because…well, I mean, it’s you—your thing.”
That little tug at her mouth disappeared. “If only you’d cared that much about me and my thing eleven years ago.”
“That’s not fair,” he said, his voice tight. “You know that’s not fair. I did care about you—”
She snorted. “Yeah, until you decided you wanted to bang Lissa Kirkland. How’s she doing, by the way?”
He gritted his teeth. Of course she would go there. “I have no idea.”
Before he could formulate any more words, there was a shout from below. “Miss Savage? Miss Savage! Could you take a look at something?”
“That’s my cue,” she said, and pushed past him to the ladder. “I’ll be right there. Stay off the stage, please,” she called down.
As