Page 78 of If This is Love

I hadmy bearings again for the most part by the time Ruth pulled into my driveway next to my truck, and I really liked how that looked.

“Now, we’re not going to make this weird,but…” Ruth said as she shifted into park, and my head was still a little foggy and disconnected, but what she just said didn’t really make much sense. She turned to me, her eyes meeting mine. “I’m going to go in with you, and I want you to take your shirt off so I can look at this spot where you feel like it’s burning.”

“It’s already weird enough that my skin burns for no reason, so it’s fine,” I mumbled, lazily lifting my hand and dropping it on my lap.

Ruth studied me below her lifted brows. She had such beautiful eyebrows. “Okay, we’re going to go ahead and go inside. Sit right there, and I’m going to come around and help you.”

She did, and then somehow we made it inside, and I now had to take off my shirt.

Ruth was standing there patiently waiting, and I was supposed to take off my shirt for her. I was wearing two shirts because it was a business casual meeting, so I had on a dress shirtplusa white cotton undershirt, and I had to take both of them off for Ruth for reasons that were basically the opposite of why I’d always wanted to take my shirt off for her. And ironically, the reason I was supposed to take off my shirt for her right now had stopped bothering me until this exact moment when it was time for me to show her what was bothering me.

This should have been a fairly simple task, but I could tell I still wasn’t quite firing on all cylinders yet. I could just feel it. And this was why I’d needed her to drive me in the first place.

I started unbuttoning, pausing midway down to pull out my shirttails, and then I just reached behind my neck and pulled both off at the same time. Ruth averted her gaze like she did that one time she caught me right after I’d jumped out of the shower. The day she kissed me, and now we were standing in that exact same spot on the rug, and I was holding my two shirts at the level of my waist while she was trying not to look.

I turned so that my back was to her.

“Where did you say it was?” she asked.

I gestured haphazardly across my shoulders and at the base of my neck. “Just all over here.”

“Where’s it worst right now?”

I reached to rub from between my shoulder blades to the base of my neck. “Imagine if I had wings.”

She hesitated. “Okay…”

“Like where the wings would be attached, but someone ripped them off.”

“Oh myheavens,” she murmured. “Okay, go lie down on the couch on your stomach. I’m going to use my phone flashlight so I can get a better look, and you’re just kind of…” She paused for a beat or two. “Tall.”

“Okay.” I went straight to the couch and lay down, unable to hold back a groan at everything that always seemed to feel achy when I was coming back from blinking out.

Ruth knelt on the rug in front of the couch, and my cheek was planted on the cushion, my face toward her, and I suddenly had an up-close-and-personal view of her breasts. She was wearing a white blouse in a delicate fabric that I could almost see through. I could see the contrast of her bra against her skin, and my dick took notice. He also took notice of how her scent was the only thing I could breathe right now.

Thank God for having to lie face down like this, otherwise this situation might have gotten really awkward.

Her smooth cool palm made contact with the burn, and chills scattered my whole body. “Here?”

“Yeah.”

“Interesting.”

I craned my neck as though I could see my own back. “What?”

“It’s hot under my fingers, but your skin is not behaving like it’s hot.” Her fingers pressed gently in a line that flanked my spine, and my eyes were practically rolling back in my head, and the old bastard downstairs was getting way too eager. “You should at least have a little bit of pink coloring back here or something. This feels like…” She pressed in different spots, moving lower down my spine but not anywhere near low enough or anywhere close to everything that wanted to feel her touch. “It’s like the heat isn’t coming from your skin. Or at least not this layer of your skin.”

Ruth suddenly pushed away from me, taking all her wonderful Ruth-ness with her. “Are you okay? Am I making you uncomfortable?”

I did a single slow blink and just gazed at her heavenly face. “Nah, I’m good, Ruth. Thanks for looking at it.”

She smiled, reaching to affectionately rub my hair back as she stood. “I’m going to try one more thing if you’ve got the right stuff in your kitchen.” I stared at her calves flexing as she strode away.

Gunner moseyed to me and sniffed my face with his big, wet nose, and I set one palm on his head, rubbing him firmly. “Good boy. Good boy, Gunner. Good boy. You did good, brother. Thanks for having my back.”

He pushed his snout in between my shoulder and the cushion like he was trying to bury his face underneath me. He was worried about me. We’d been a team long enough for him to catch on to patterns and learn to differentiate between the levels of intensity with my episodes, and sometimes he would get a little more uneasy than usual. He’d been acting that way since I lost my shit theothertime I met Emma and Austin. Like he could tell the project itself was starting to wear me down even before I’d fully convinced myself of that. We both knew where this was heading.

Gunner’s snout snuggled up against me relaxed me even further, and my eyelids were just getting heavy when the scent of fresh citrus andRuthwafted into my nose.

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