Page 47 of Colton's Secret Weapon
One he’d thought would be miraculously short. He was starting to accept that it could turn out to be much longer than he’d expected.
As in, a regular workload for the time it took to get St. James Boats back on its feet. Whether for Bob to run, or to sell. Either way, Mitchell’s part came first.
He had another, much larger challenge facing him before he moved from the chair. She might think she’d distracted him with her breathing antics. But, “I need your promise, Dove. You go nowhere alone, you continue to stay at my place, until this serial killer is found or the police find proof that Fletcher or someone else vandalized Namaste and was watching your place.”
“I promise.”
With a sharp turn of his head, he stared into the eyes facing straight at him. “I mean it,” he said. “No funny business.”
“You mean like saying that an angel was with me so I wasn’t alone? Or flew in my window and carried me out into the night?” She looked so innocent as she spoke.
Mitchell wasn’t sure if she was being facetious, or if she knew what the town thought of her. He feared the latter.
And hated that he’d made her feel that way.
“I meant no making a promise and then finding a way around keeping it.”
She continued to watch him—study him was more like it. Giving him nothing from within herself. “I can’t tell if you’re saying you don’t trust me to keep a promise or just think I’m naive enough to not realize that, under no circumstances, am I to waver from the dictates you laid down.”
When she put it like that…
Mitchell took another deep breath. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I trust you to keep your promise. And I absolutely do not think you’re naive.” He meant to leave it there. And started talking again anyway. “But I also know that you’re independent, headstrong and smart enough to find a way to manipulate a situation if you feel a need to go outside the boundaries I’ve set.”
She smiled then. An expression that started in her eyes seconds before it landed on her mouth. “You might be right in other, less severe circumstances,” she told him and then her expression turning serious in an instant said, “I know that my best chance at making it through this in as successful a way as possible is with you, Mitchell. The things you’ve already done for me, calling in the best of the best to help when, without you, my father more likely would have died out there before anyone found him. The safe place to sleep you’re providing…until this is over, you’re the boss. That’s just the way it is.”
A deluge of sweet relief hit him, wiped away in the next second when she added, “In terms of the guidelines you set out above, and for the stated purposes.”
The woman just wasn’t going to stop challenging his thinking every step of the way. “Mind expanding on that?” he asked. Not willing to risk another embarrassment by hazarding his own guess.
“Just that,” she told him. “Speaking literally here, Mitchell, keep up.”
Not hating their repartee as much as he’d have liked, he met her gaze full on. “Go on,” he told her. More out of curiosity than anything else.
“I still have autonomy over all of my choices that don’t involve keeping me safe from the bad guys.”
Here it came. The out he’d been expecting from the beginning. “Such as?”
“Such as a choice I could make to…accept physical activities while in your care.” She didn’t even blink as she said the words. Her gaze locked on his the entire time. “Were something to arise in that area, I do not want to hear anything about you taking advantage because I’m in your care or beside myself with fear or worry or grief. Nor will I accept that my concurrence with your stipulations put us in a situation that opens the door to concerns about sex in the workplace, or any other possible moral or legal consequence you could see possibly arising in the future as a result of the…activity…while I am under this safety agreement with you.”
No smile cracking on that one. Not even a hint.
She was dead serious.
And the only response Mitchell could conjure up was…
A very slow nod.
Whaler hadn’t given even a hint of waking by nine that evening when the small ward went into lockdown for the night. Two nurses, an orderly and a police officer were all there just to watch over her father, and Dove had to be content with that.
A trauma doctor was on duty in the urgent care portion of the facility and would be checking in on their one inpatient. He assured Dove, just before she left with Mitchell, that he expected her father to rest peacefully through the night.
And that they’d call the second there was any change in his condition or hint of him waking up.
Knowing that she would be no good to her dad if she didn’t get some rest—most particularly after her mostly sleepless hours the night before—she gave him kisses on both cheeks. Told him she loved him. That she’d see him in the morning.
And then, with tears in her eyes, walked beside Mitchell out to his car.
“His vitals are good,” he said more as a reminder to her, she figured, than anything else.
