Page 72 of The Vigilant

She’d brought me back.

“Sutton.” My voice didn’t even sound like my own when I saw her.

She was sitting beside the bed—the gurney—in one of the recliners from the living room that she’d dragged over.

From the imprint in the dark brown leather, it looked like she’d been there for days.

And from the look in her eyes, she seemed just as enraged with me now as she was when we’d last argued right before…

“What happened?” I croaked, a fresh pain lancing the dryness in my throat.

Her legs uncurled from the seat, and she set aside my leather jacket—she was sewing my leather jacket.

“You tried to save me and got stabbed for the effort.” She stood, her tight clothing—whichwasn’thers—clung to every lithe curve.

My eyes flicked down my bare chest. The middle of it, just below my pec to the top of my abs, was wrapped in bandages like a mummy, a distinct bulge on my left side where the wound was and extra packing added underneath.

Damn. In the moment, I hadn’t thought the wound was too bad, but apparently that was the adrenaline thinking.

I looked back up, following Sutton as she went to the kitchen and grabbed a cold water from the fridge. The way she moved through my home gave me the sense she’d spent plenty of time in it already.

The idea was almost as unacceptable as the pleasure it gave me.

“Here, drink this.” She uncapped the bottle, but when she went to put it to my lips, I turned my head to the side, biting through the lance of pain.

“What…happened?”

Her lip twitched, and then she reached out and cupped the side of my face. “Don’t be stupid,” she muttered and pressed the bottle to my lips. “Drink.”

Our eyes locked, something more than water passing between us. Something heavier when I opened my mouth for her. Something hotter when she tipped the bottle to let the cool water soothe my parched throat.

“I drove us back here,” she began to answer after a second. “But you were pretty much unconscious by the time we arrived. Barely holding on…” Her voice loosened inside the memory, and for a moment, I saw the softness that came over her beautiful face. The pain. The worry. The ache she’d felt for me.

It was so…overwhelming. A sip of water ended down the wrong pipe, and I started to cough.

Each wrench of my chest felt like I was being stabbed again and again, but I gladly endured the massacre when I saw how she’d worried for me.

“Thankfully, Dr. Nilsen was here almost immediately.” She capped the bottle, and then, without thinking, brought her hand back to my face, her thumb swiping the water that beaded on my chin and bottle lip.

“You saved me,” I said, and her finger paused right in the center of my mouth, the tip of her pointed nail resting just through my lips.

It was as though she wanted to push her thumb straight into my mouth, to push the words I’d said right back to where they’d come from. But she caught herself, jerking her hand away a split second later.

“I shouldn’t have had to,” she declared; an amateur would think the anger in her voice was directed at me, but an expert would only hear self-loathing. “You got lucky. No major internal damage, so stitches. A blood transfusion. And rest for a couple of days.”

But not for her. I could practically see her determination pumping through her as if the arteries flowing with it were on the outside of her skin.

“Sutton.” I braced myself and tried to sit up straighter, sending pain ricocheting from every corner of my skin.

“What are you—stop. Don’t move—” Her body sluiced across mine, her hands finding the bare angles of my shoulders to try to keep me down.

But even wounded, she didn’t have enough leverage.

“I swear if you pop your stitches?—”

“Rorik—Dr. Nilsen will fix them,” I finished for her. Rorik had patched up each one of us more times than we could count.

“But I’ll still be blamed,” she mumbled, letting go of me when she realized it was pointless. “I’m supposed to watch you. Make sure you’re—you don’t hurt yourself.”

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