Rough Edge (The Edge #1)(11)

“Where is he?” I craned my neck. “He sent me some referrals. I owe him a drink.”

I saw him before the last word was out of my mouth, but he already had a drink in his hand. He wedged his way through the crowd toward us.

“What are you doing here?” I asked as he kissed my cheek.

“Business.”

“Obviously,” Jenn said. “No one’s here for the food.”

“Thank you for the referrals,” I said. “I owe you a drink.”

“Open bar doesn’t count.”

We were talking about something unimportant when Ronin put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me to him, but we were laughing.

“Blah blah,” Colin complained. “Caden’s here.”

He crossed the room to my husband, whose eyes were on me. Caden wore a deep navy suit and a gold tie. His cufflinks sparkled, and his hair was combed off his face. The fact that he hadn’t shaved contrasted the crispness of the suit against the animal body inside it.

We went quiet. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Ronin.

Ronin removed his arm from my shoulders.

Colin interrupted the gaze by shaking my husband’s hand and making some sort of wisecrack he must have found hilarious.

Caden, not as much. He’d turned his attention back to me.

“Girl. He looks like he wants to eat you alive,” Jenn said into her glass.

I turned to Ronin so I could blame him, but he was gone. Caden maneuvered to us.

“My dad never looked at my mom like that,” Jenn continued.

Before I could offer a snappy answer, Caden found us and kissed Jenn on the cheek. He kissed my cheek in the same platonic way, then looked behind him, but no one was there.

“Where’s Colin?” I asked.

“Bar.”

When I turned to scan the bar for my brother, I leaned into Caden a little. We had a pattern. A rhythm to our interactions. The shape of the space between us, laid out over the time together, was as predictable as the phases of the moon, and his touch always came when expected.

But when we looked at Colin as he tried to charm a young lady in a gold dress, Caden didn’t lean in when I did. He didn’t put his hand on my back. When Bob Abramson found me and said he wanted me to meet someone, my husband didn’t take my hand. When Wilhelmina, the head cardiac nurse, her hair braided into long, neat rows, gave me a kiss and asked how I was handling my husband’s hours, Caden didn’t come close to me and brush his thumb between my shoulder blades. When we all sat down for a presentation about the hospital’s goals, he kept his hands folded in his lap.

When he released his hands and placed them on his knees, I put my left hand over his right. He patted it, smiled at me, and slipped it away before looking behind him again.

I thought he was in a bad mood.

What else could it be?





Chapter Seven





Caden





The war had been building for over a month. The ventilators were left to do their job, but the squeak of gurney wheels on linoleum, the tip-tap of computer keys, the murmurs of the hospital staff all held a thread of the Thing I thought I’d banished. I could have a conversation with Greyson, but only if I concentrated on not hearing the Thing in the boiling pasta water or the radio news. Every day, it got a little stronger. Every day I was a little more tense, a little more afraid, a little more uncomfortable. The Thing got harder to box away and cart off. Harder to hide behind a wall. Impossible to ignore. I was pressed in on all sides by a Thing I couldn’t even define.

And what had become more and more clear was that it wanted my wife.



* * *



“Caden!”

I was in the changing room, getting my scrubs off, when Bob Abramson, the hospital director, came in. My senseless, gland-centric reaction was anger. He wanted her too, but for different reasons.

“Bob.” I got my suit out of the locker.

“Are you going to the fundraiser tonight?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Tina Molino from the psych hospital’s going. You should introduce yourself.”

I slapped my locker door closed so hard it rattled. “I know her. She had a lot of questions about military trauma. I guess the Gibson wing’s going through then?”

“Anything’s possible with funding.”

“I know you’re eyeing my wife.” That came out wrong. Wrestling with this Thing and trying to have a conversation with my boss was crossing my wires.

He overlooked my words in favor of my intentions. “She’s got the right history. She understands the military. Has done a ton of PTSD work. We could really use her.”

“Really?” I slid the padlock in the loop but didn’t close it. I hadn’t finished with the locker, but had slammed it closed to make a point. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was jealous. Not sexually jealous. I was jealous of her time and attention. “Well, you can talk to her about it, but don’t expect much. She’s busy.”

“The best ones are.”

Getting snippy with the hospital director wasn’t my best decision and it wasn’t something I had control over, though of course, in the moment, it felt like the purest form of control. That was the thing about impulsive behavior. It hid behind a mask of power.