Page 77 of Silent Threat
“Mild concussion.”
His expression said he wasn’t impressed by her nitpicking.
She didn’t have it in her to argue with him. “You can stay half an hour, if it makes you feel better. You don’t need to stay all night.”
“I won’t. At midnight, I’ll go feed your small herd of skunks. I figure you can handle an hour alone. As long as you promise not to lie down and fall asleep.”
She couldn’t say no to his offer to take the midnight feeding. She hadn’t asked Kelly because her cousin had made it clear in the past that she was not going anywhere near the skunks. The skunklets wouldn’t starve in a single night; they’d be just extra hungry by morning. But if they didn’t have to go hungry, Annie would definitely prefer that.
The fact that Cole thought of her skunks had to go into the same vault where his two kisses were locked away—things she’d think about later. “Thank you.”
He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “No big deal. Unless I get sprayed. If the little stinkers spray me, you’re going to owe me for the rest of your life. Just so we’re clear.”
“You ever need a kidney, I’ll hand one right over.”
He smiled.
She wanted to step into his arms and lay her head on his chest.Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
She glanced at the bedside clock that showed past eleven o’clock. She gestured him to the chair and went to sit on the bed as she had with Harper. Except Cole took up a lot more room, both physically and emotionally. She was aware of him as she hadn’t been aware of the detective.
She cleared her throat. “Now what?”
He pulled a deck of cards from his pocket. “We’ll play strip poker.”
She had to work on not laughing. “I don’t think so.”
“Fine. Regular poker.” He murmured something under his breath about people who had no sense of adventure, then shuffled the deck and dealt. “Did you like Broslin when you were a kid?”
She looked at her cards and practiced her best poker face. “I always liked the woods. Always liked nature and animals. I grew up on my grandparents’ farm. When my grandmother was still alive, they grew soybeans and raised goats. My grandmother made goat cheese and soap from goat milk.”
“I don’t think they have goats in Chicago,” Cole said. “Not the part where I lived. And in my neighborhood, people mostly went to the park to buy drugs.”
She thought about that as she played her cards. “That could be a problem. You didn’t grow up with the idea of nature as a good place.”
“I saw plenty of nature in the service.”
She considered that for a few seconds. “Yes, but when you were in some desert or on an Afghan hillside, you were there expecting to kill or to be killed.”
The very thing that had been a source of peace and nourishment for her, had been a place of deadly danger for him. Her heart cracked.
“I don’t mind walking through the woods with you,” he said. Then he added, “You should take another couple of days off from work.”
“It’s not like my work is difficult. The woods are my healing place. I’ll just walk through slower than usual. Helping others will stop me from thinking about my own problems all day.”
“But no more sessions with me?”
“No. Sorry.” Definitely not after that second kiss. She cleared her throat. “We can go for walks as friends.”
His eyes said he had some very definite opinions onfriends. He didn’t voice them. Maybe he didn’t think she could handle it.
He was right about that.
He glanced at the clock, put his cards on the small desk facedown, then stood and fixed her with a stern look. “Don’t look at my cards while I’m gone. If you do, I’ll know it.”
“Sure you will.”
“It’s a Navy SEAL thing.”
