Page 79 of Skin Deep

“It’s her thing.” Harrison lifted his hands.

The memory of Mari hitting me with the hose before my grandfather left us was fresh in my mind. I narrowed my eyes against his sister’s back. Maybe she felt it. She turned her face a fraction and narrowed back, then she turned when a car pulled up to the curb. I rushed inside, grabbing a fresh shirt and sweatshirt, and rushed back outside with them.

The detective stopped talking when I tried to peel the frozen shirt from Harrison’s skin. In my panic to get him dry, I realized how I was treating him.

“Here,” I said, handing him the clothes. “You need to change. You are wet and it is cold outside. You will get sick!” I whispered.

The detective turned his face and grinned a bit. Harrison took the clothes inside and changed. I caught Harrison’s sister’s eyes as she left with her husband.

“Italian, right?” the detective said to me.

“Sì,” I said, meeting his eyes.

He smiled. “I dated an Italian girl back in the day. Had a huge family. I’m not sure I can even remember who was who now. Fun bunch, though. The house always felt alive. But her mom had this thing about being wet out in the cold. She swore that’s how you get sick. Maria could never go to bed with her hair wet, not even in the summer.”

I shrugged, because up until he pointed it out, I hadn’t even realized…but it was the truth.

Harrison came out wearing the sweatshirt, the t-shirt peeking out from underneath, a pair of grey sweatpants, and his baseball cap turned backward.

“What?” He looked between me and the detective.

“Nothing,” I breathed out.

He looked fine and distinguished in the suits he wore. He was sex on legs in jeans. But…this.Madonna.

“How’s the shoulder?” the detective said, breaking up the way our eyes were devouring each other.

He rolled it. “Never be the same, but feeling more worth it every day.”

“Excuse me?”

He turned away from me and met the detective’s eyes. “You asked about the shoulder.”

“The wound?”

Harrison blinked at him. “Yeah. All right. I’ve had worse.”

“I think it would be best—”

After the surge of heat that rushed through my blood, I truly felt the cold. I went to walk past Harrison, but he stopped me with a hand on my arm.

“Where are you going?”

“A shower,” I said.

His eyes seemed to heat, matching the temperature of my blood. Remembering what I had. The shower we took together at my casa in Modica. It still made me breathless to think about. I did not think it was only that, but everything that had happened. The thought of something happening to him…the thought of him fighting lions for another woman…it made me want to be as physically close to him as possible. If the thought of her was pulling him closer—I would pull harder.

He shook his head. “Not without me, baby.”

He wrapped his arm around my waist, pulling me in, keeping me tucked into his warmth until everyone cleared out and we were left alone. We let Augustus out in the backyard, and he started to sniff around, investigating everything. The silence seemed loud after the chaos, until Harrison drowned it out.

“Lupo, is that right?”

“It means wolf,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I got that. Sort of like the tattoo on Macchiavello’s hand.”

He became quiet after that. Too quiet. Like his thoughts had turned as dark as the night. So had his mood.

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