Ten Below Zero(51)

I put the knife back in my pocket and looked around, seeing Mira standing nearby with her hand on the gun on her hip. The other man, the man that Six had hired to hang around, was helping Everett up.

Mira walked to me. “You need to get out of here,” she said in a low voice.

I nodded and walked to Everett, who was standing feet away from the man he’d subdued. Everett was breathing hard, trembling. I put a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

“Cora.” The voice came from the man on the ground. I looked at Mira and she shook her head.

“Go,” she mouthed.



“Sit here,” I said, dragging a chair from the table to the bathroom in our hotel room.

Everett looked at me warily from by the window. We’d gotten a hotel room in Denver after I’d stopped at a drugstore to get some bandages for his knuckles. Everett had received just one blow to the face, a cut on his eyebrow, before he got the rest of the hits in. His knuckles were red and swollen, and I worried he’d broken more than one of his fingers.

We hadn’t spoken since leaning the ranch. I’d forced Everett into the passenger seat because he was fuming and then used the GPS to find the closest hotel in the city.

When Everett still hadn’t moved from the window, I walked over to him and gripped his arm in my hand. “Don’t be a baby.”

Everett yanked his arm from my hand but still followed me to the chair. I held a hand out for his and looked up to his face. Blood from the cut on his eyebrow was slowly trickling down his face. I knew head wounds often bled more than wounds on other parts of the body, but it still unnerved me a bit to see blood trickling down with some dried blood hanging on the side of his face. That could wait, I’d decided. His hands needed to be looked at.

I crouched in front of him and looked over his hands. All the self-defense training I’d done with Mira had given me a lot of bloody, bruised knuckles, so I knew a little bit about how to treat them. I looked closely at the knuckles on his middle fingers especially, as they’d taken the brunt of the beating.

“Bend your fingers.”

Everett didn’t. I looked up at him from my position crouched on the floor in front of him. “Bend them,” I said again, one eyebrow raised. I felt him bend them, though I could tell it was uncomfortable. “Good.” I flipped his hands over and set them, palms up, on the tops of his thighs. I ran my fingers over them, from tip to base, making sure they felt fine. Nothing seemed to be dislocated or broken. “I think you’re going to be okay, but you’ll need to ice them and take something for the swelling.”

Holding his hands, I pulled him to standing and led him to the sink. “Let’s wash the dried blood off so I can bandage them.” He remained silent. I looked up in the mirror over the sink as I washed his hands, and met his eyes. He was looking at me with such intensity in his eyes that his silence spoke volumes. I swallowed and looked down at his hands again, finishing up washing them.

I gestured for him to sit in the chair again and then carefully patted his hands dry with a washcloth. “You probably don’t need this, but I don’t want to hear you whining because your hands hurt and are infected,” I said, opening up the package of bacitracin.

His silence was getting to me. For someone who spent so much time in the silence, I was baffled why it bothered me so much now. But it did. So I kept making little comments, trying to get a rise out of him.

He didn’t flinch as I applied the cream to his knuckles. Some of the knuckles had their skin ripped off from the repeated blows Everett had delivered to the other man. I applied band-aids to the knuckles that were especially torn up and then wet a washcloth. “Your knuckles don’t look too bad, but your face looks pretty rough.”

Still silence. I gritted my teeth and warmed the washcloth with the water. As I wrung out the excess water, I looked at him in the mirror. He was still watching me, his eyes on mine. I couldn’t read what his body language was saying, but his eyes were smoldering. With anger, with lust? I wasn’t sure. I turned back to face him and applied the wash cloth to the dried blood on his cheek first. With one hand, I pushed back his hair to clean the blood along the blood along his hairline. My hand gripped a bit in his hair, my fingers feeling the silkiness of his strands.

The room got smaller and the walls moved in while I cleaned his face. I tried to focus my thoughts away from my attraction to him. But I couldn’t. Lust was beginning to suffocate me as my fingers played with his hair and my other hand rubbed the washcloth on his skin. I purposefully avoided looking into his eyes and concentrated on cleaning the blood away.

I was close enough that his breath was on my neck, blowing warmth right down to my chest. I swallowed and knew his eyes tracked the movement of my throat. My legs tingled and my blood rushed to the surface of my skin.

I moved the washcloth up his face, slowly rubbing circles into his skin to remove the dried blood. There shouldn’t have been anything erotic about that moment, but with his warm breath on my neck and my hand in his hair while I was inches from his face, I could feel desire all the way in my bones. I blew out a breath on his skin, right over the wetness left on his skin from the washcloth. That seemed to be his undoing, because before I knew it his arms wrapped around me and yanked me onto his lap so I was straddling him. We were face to face, his arms crushing me to him, our breathing mingling in the small space.