come running. Otherwise I can take care of myself.”
“Or you can call me if there’s anything you need,” Sutter said anyway.
The colonel shooed them out of the room.
But as Kinsey headed for Sutter and the door, she still said, “I’ll be back in the morning.”
The colonel’s only response was, “Catch that dog! He has my bookmark!”
Sutter nabbed Jack before he could slip past him and retrieved the bookmark, handing it to Kinsey to pass to the colonel.
“Insubordinate animal!” the colonel muttered disapprovingly.
“I’m going to take care of that, too,” Kinsey assured her.
But the colonel did not respond and Kinsey didn’t wait for her to. Instead she went with Sutter out into the hallway, closing his mother’s bedroom door behind them and following him down the stairs to the first floor.
When they reached the entryway he said under his breath and facetiously, “And that would be my mother.”
Kinsey laughed. “Basically what I expected,” she said.
“She didn’t fluster you,” he observed with some surprise in his tone.
“I was raised by a retired marine, I have three brothers serving right now.” She laughed again. “I hate to tell you, but you all run a pattern that I’m pretty familiar with.”
His eyebrows arched. “Are your brothers here or—”
“They’re all overseas.”
“Ah, that makes more sense. You said yesterday that you wanted to get to know the Camdens to have family around. I wondered what that meant if you had three brothers.”
“It means that I’m all there is here,” she said. Then, offering no more than that, she switched gears. “You texted that you need stitches removed?”
“It’s been more than ten days since the second surgery and they’re pinching bad. I’d do it myself if I could find any scissors around here but I can’t. I tried to get a nurse at the hospital to do it—I figured they were in and out of my mother’s room every five minutes anyway, why couldn’t they? But no chance of that. They were going to send me to the emergency room to see a doctor and waste my whole day.”
“I need a look at your injury anyway to figure out an approach for your physical therapy. If the stitches are ready to come out, I can do it. I brought another kit for that but it’s in my car. I’ll run out and get it while you take off the sling and your shirt.”
“You want to do it in the kitchen?” he asked.
Take out his stitches in the kitchen, Kinsey mentally amended when her mind went to another meaning of doing it. What was it with her brain making everything risqué?
“Wherever I’ll have the brightest light,” she said as she shoved her thoughts onto the right track and left him in the entryway to step into the evening air.
Where she could cool off.
Really, what’s going on when it comes to this guy?
Maybe the same thing that had caused her to debate about what she wore and how she did her hair for this initial meeting with his mother.
Kinsey was disgusted with herself for the amount of time and consideration she’d put into her appearance today. Since she wasn’t affiliated with a home–health care company, there was no dress code. It was her choice whether to wear scrubs or street clothes. She used whatever she would be doing on any particular day as the decider—something messy, scrubs. Something not messy, street clothes.
Today, the first day of meeting a difficult patient whose respect she needed, she knew she had to go with her lab coat over business attire.
Yet something in her had wanted to dress casually, in something cute. And that impulse had come complete with the image of Sutter Knightlinger in the back of her mind.
Okay, so he was a good-looking guy. So what? She couldn’t let it interfere with her job with his mother or her goal with the Camdens.
That’s what she’d told herself as she’d stood in front of her closet and it was what she told herself again now.
Of course it had only partially worked earlier.
She had put on the tailored navy blue pantsuit she wore as business attire, with the lab coat over it.
But then, instead of putting her hair up to make her look competent and efficient, she’d worn it down, losing that battle with herself completely. Along with the one against using a little eyeliner and a touch of highlighter on the crest of her cheekbones above her blush.
It was ridiculous, she told herself as she reached across the driver’s seat to retrieve her kit from the passenger side. He was a career marine, and that was the only thing she needed to know to count him out of any kind of personal relationship. She could work for him, he could be one of the means to her ends with the Camdens, but that was it!
So no more of this silliness, she vowed as she relocked her car. From here on, her clothes, her hair, were going to be chosen without him as any part of the equation. And if there were any more temperature changes due to being around him? She’d ignore the phenomenon until it went away.
She found him in the kitchen, having done what she’d told him to do—he’d removed the sling from his left arm and taken off his shirt.
As a nurse she’d seen more male torsos than she could remember and never once had there been one that did to her what that first sight of Sutter did. Suddenly she was hot and cold and felt as if everything inside of her had gone a little spongy.
Because despite the bandage wrapping his left arm and shoulder, her view was of bulging biceps, shoulders a mile wide, a superbly broad chest, super flat abs with more than a six-pack—she counted eight rows of sinew that went down to his waistband—and all of it astonishingly sexy. Fortunately, he was draping his shirt over the back of a chair so he didn’t notice her reaction.
She took a very deep breath, thinking that she could have used some of the colonel’s oxygen at that moment, and exhaled, all the while telling herself to snap out of whatever this strange reaction to him was.
Then she went the rest of the way into the kitchen, set her kit on the table and said, “Let me wash my hands.”
Breathe... Breathe... Stop being stupid...she told herself.
Then, shoulders back and reminding herself that she was a professional, she dried her hands on a clean paper towel and turned to Sutter once again.
He was no less fabulous. And now she was going to get up close and personal...
“Okay, sit down and let’s see what we have here,” she said too merrily.
She removed the bandaging to expose a large incision and the remnants of his original wound.
Concentrating on sounding normal as she went to work on the stitches, she
