stared at her outstretched fingers, noting the short, neat nails and wondering if she still nibbled them when she was nervous. He put his hand in hers and it felt impossibly right. As always.
She helped him to his feet and looked at the bandage. “Not a lot of seepage through the bandage. That’s good, I think.”
“You hope,” he murmured, not missing the uncertainty in her tone.
Her brown eyes met his. “You probably should have gone in search of a doctor for help. Might’ve been a little more pragmatic.”
His fingers itched to touch her face, to trace the angular lines of her jaw and brush across her parted lips, but he balled his hands into fists and controlled the urge. “I just wish I hadn’t put you right in the middle of all of this. You don’t need the headache.”
“What’s one more headache?” Her lopsided half smile nearly shattered his control, and for a second he forgot the pain in his side, the trouble hanging over his head and the eight years that had passed since he’d last kissed Delilah Hammond’s soft, pink mouth.
He wanted her. He’d wanted her from the first moment she walked into his office, all long legs and brilliant brains, and he had a feeling he was going to want her for the rest of his life.
What would she do if he told her she was the reason he’d never been able to take things to the next level with Liz? Or with any other woman he’d met since she walked into his office eleven years ago?
But he wouldn’t tell her. Because one thing hadn’t changed. He was still too wed to his job to be any good for a woman. Look how desperate he was to prove his innocence and get reinstated.
He’d already made the mistake of trying to have it all, and that had been a spectacular disaster. He wasn’t going to make that mistake twice.
“There’s some ibuprofen in the cabinet by the fridge. I’ll go get the first-aid kit.” She left the kitchen, giving him a chance to get his desire for her under control for the moment, though he was beginning to wonder how long he could ignore the truth.
All the other excuses—the proximity to Oak Ridge, the Davenport Trucking connection, his suspicion that Cortland might have allies in the small mountain town of Bitterwood—were meaningless in the face of his real reason for coming here.
He’d come to Tennessee because it was where she was. Even if there wasn’t a damned thing he could offer her but more heartache.
She returned with the first-aid kit and the bucket of soapy water. “Want to do this here or in the living room?”
“Here is fine.” He lifted his arm to give her easier access to his bandage. “Be careful. You know I’m delicate.”
She slanted a look at him, as he’d intended. “Yeah, you’re a real hothouse flower.” Still, she was gentle as she tugged the tape away from the bandage she’d applied to his side the night before.
He sneaked a quick look at the furrow the bullet had torn in the skin just above his left hip. It appeared a bloody mess, but the margins of the wounds seemed less inflamed, as if healing had already begun. “What do you think?”
“It looks better. I wish I could get you some antibiotics, though.”
“We’ll keep an eye on my temperature and keep the wound clean. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Her gaze lifted to his. “I’m not a big fan of depending on luck.”
He smiled. “Not everything can be planned to death, Hammond.”
“Anything worth doing deserves the attempt to plan it to death,” she retorted, drenching a washcloth in the suds. She cleaned the wound as carefully as possible, wincing when he couldn’t hold back a gasp of pain. “Sorry!”
“You should call your mother,” he said as she patted the bullet wound dry and pulled out a tube of antibiotic cream. “So she doesn’t come looking for you. You left there pretty quickly last night.”
“I told her I had to help a friend in need.”
“You have a lot of friends around here?”
She slanted a look up at him as she closed the tube. “Some.”
“Any who’d be in enough trouble to drag you away from dinner with your mother?”
“Not really,” she admitted. “But my mother doesn’t know that.”
He arched his eyebrows. His own mother had always known everything, even things he’d tried to keep secret from her. She’d been the one who’d first realized his feelings for the new female agent under his supervision weren’t entirely professional. Even as she was fighting the cancer that finally took her, she’d seen past his casual remarks about his team and focused like a laser on his mentions of Delilah Hammond.
“You can’t see her and stay her supervisor, you know,” she’d told him. Brand was a third-generation FBI agent, so his mother knew the rules as well as he did, having been married to an agent for more than forty years. “You’ll have to make a choice, just like before.”
And he had, eventually. Just not the one Delilah might have wanted.
“Mothers know stuff,” he warned Delilah as she applied a clean bandage to his injury. “Call her before she decides to drop by.”
“I’ll call her soon.” Her fingers were warm and gentle, making the flesh of his side ripple with awareness. He tried not to imagine her hands tracing a fiery path up his body, tried not to remember just how talented those hands could be when she chose to let them wander.
“How’s she doing?”
Her answering look was wary. “She’s gone on the wagon again.”
“How long?”
“This is day four.” She released a soft sigh. “She seemed to be doing well when I saw her last night. You don’t think my leaving early would have set her off on a binge, do you?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. During the handful of years he and Delilah had worked together, he’d seen her go through the hopeful highs and crushing lows of her mother’s attempts at sobriety. “What do you think?”
“I think she’s failed eight times before now. The odds aren’t good.”
And yet she still wanted to believe her mother could change. Hope, battered but not yet dead, hovered behind her dark eyes.
He cradled her face between his palms and pressed his lips to her forehead, helpless to stop himself. She stepped closer to him, her body brushing his. He felt the rapid thud of her heart against his chest, an echo of his own galloping pulse.
A pounding sound from the front of the house sent her skittering away, her face turning toward the sound. She uttered a low curse.
“Your mom?” he asked in a whisper.
“I don’t know.” She waved her arm toward the doorway. “My bedroom is the first room down the hall. Go there and lock the door. And take this stuff with you.”
