CHAPTER NINE
Dillon pushed the elevator button that would take him up to the floor where he could check in on Sarah and Caleb and Tim and tried to push thoughts of Kit from his mind. She’d been distracting him all day. But he couldn’t help but grin about it. She’d distracted him before. Every time she wore her red skirt, for instance. And every time she got on his case about something. And every time he got close enough to smell her. And every time she gave him one of her signature eye rolls.
But today was different. Today he was grinning the grin of a fool in love. And he didn’t mind. Three people had already commented on his great mood, and Janice had caught him whistling earlier.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t a happy, upbeat guy usually. But he was serious at work. He joked, he smiled, he tried to praise the staff when he could, and he always tried to be honest but optimistic with patients. But he wasn’t the type to stroll down the hallway, hands in his pockets, whistling.
But right now he was definitely strolling toward Sarah’s room and biting back the urge to whistle.
Earlier when he’d gone to check on the new mom, the nurses had told him she was still asleep after a long night with a newborn who had his days and nights mixed up. Tim had arrived around eight and had instantly taken over with Caleb, and Sarah, knowing he was there, had fallen into a deep sleep. Tim was fixing things—exactly as Dillon had predicted.
Dillon had been pleased to find that Sarah had turned it all over, and the nursing staff had given Tim a list of things they needed him to do, from bathing to filling out paperwork to just holding his son. They were a small hospital and didn’t have a dedicated nursery staff, so most babies stayed in the mother’s room. Which was fine. Unless the mother desperately needed sleep and the baby refused to cooperate.
As Dillon knocked on the door frame to Sarah’s room and peered inside, the sight that met him made his chest feel suddenly tight. Tim was sitting on the edge of Sarah’s bed, where she held their son. The look on Tim’s face hit Dillon hard. That was a man in love. With his wife. With his son. With his life.
“Hi, Dr. Alexander,” Sarah said, looking up.
“Hey, everyone.” He sauntered into the room, trying to seem totally casual about being hit between the eyes by the family moment. And the want that it shot through him.
The way Sarah was looking at Caleb, the way she smiled when she looked up at Tim—she had a softness about her. A glow.
He wanted that. He wanted it on Kit. He wanted her soft and glowing the way she had been that morning, every morning. Because of him. Because he made her happy and gave her fulfillment that she couldn’t get anywhere else.
“Any chance I can take these two home today?” Tim asked.
Dillon had been expecting the question. “Medically, everything looks great, but I want to check road conditions and weather reports before you head out,” he said. “The last thing you need is to be stranded by the road or stuck in a hotel with a newborn and postpartum wife.” He gave them both a smile.
“I would never take them if I wasn’t sure it was completely safe,” Tim said quickly. “But I also want to get them home. I can take better care of them there.”
Sarah reached up to touch his cheek, and Dillon couldn’t look away as she said, “You’re our hero.”
He wanted that. He wanted to be Kit’s hero. The one who made her look at him like that. The one who deserved her looking at him like that. He’d always loved ruffling her feathers and riling her up and making her grit her teeth. Because he couldn’t have anything else.
Now he could. Now he could have this—this love, this sweetness, this feeling of We’re in this together.
They’d done a ton of projects together over the years, and they’d turned out amazing. Sure, they’d fought their way through it, but together they could do anything. He knew it. So the next project was building a relationship. A life. And they were going to make it incredible.
“I’m going to look through your chart one more time,” he told Sarah and Tim. “And I’m going to make a couple calls to be sure things are safe. But if it’s all a go, you can head home today.”
“Thanks, Dr. Alexander.” Tim stuck his hand out, and Dillon shook it.
“Just take care of them.”
“Of course.” Tim looked over and smiled at Sarah. “That’s my whole job.”
Amazed by the tightness he suddenly felt in his throat, Dillon headed for the hallway, pulling his phone from his pocket. He hit Bree’s name in his contact list.
“Dr. Go All Night, what can I do for you?” Bree answered on the second ring.
Dillon laughed. “Hey, Officer Smart-Ass. I need an official road report between here and Chicago.” He had to admit, getting teased about last night felt nice. Like this was official.
“Only if you and Kit promise to come out with Max and me and Avery and Jake Friday night,” she said.
But he could hear her typing on her end and knew she was checking the official reports. He could find the road conditions in Nebraska easily enough, and Iowa and Illinois, for that matter. But he knew the highway patrol would be putting out warnings to troops that would be more detailed, and Bree would be able to access it all faster than he could.
Plus, okay, maybe he’d reverted to a fourteen-year-old boy who wanted to hear if the girl he had a crush on had said anything about him to her best friend.
“We were probably going to stay in,” he told Bree.
“Oh my God!” Bree exclaimed. “You had twelve straight hours of sex last night! You’ve got tonight and tomorrow and Thursday night. And you can take her home Friday night afterward. Can’t you take a couple hours off?”
“I don’t know. That’s a couple of hours,” he said, grinning.
“No. That woman needs to eat if you’re going to keep going like this. Bring her to A Bar at seven Friday night.” A Bar was the only bar in Chance and was actually named Sorry Mom, We Bought A Bar, but the shorter name had caught on quickly.
He sighed dramatically into the phone. “Okay, but only long enough for her to eat. And don’t you have your own up-all-night guy who you’re dying to stay home with?”
“Yes, but that man understands the importance of my having a regular cheeseburger. I’m amazing when I have some good meat in me.”
Dillon let the pause after her words go on a little extra long. Then he said, “Can I please say it?”
“Do you have to?”
“I think I do.”
“Well, go ahead, then.”
“I’ll be sure that Kit has some good meat tonight, too.”
Bree chuckled. “That wasn’t as bad as I expected.”
He grinned. “I’m the nice one of the three of us,” he said of him and his cousins.
“Um, no, I don’t think that’s true. Jake’s the charmer, Max is the goofball, and you’re the big badass. Huh,” she said. “Look at that. None of you is nice.”
He was the big badass? He supposed he could see where that came from. But he was feeling a little softer lately, too. Since he’d moved home, and certainly since last night. “Then it might surprise you that I was whistling today at work.”
He strode to the nurse’s station and grabbed Sarah’s chart.
“I don’t know—what were you whistling?”
“That matters? It’s whistling.”
“Of course. If you were whistling the Darth Vader theme song, that’s not quite as nice as something like ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.’”
He chuckled. “You’ve got me there. Let’s just say it was more along the lines of the latter.”
“You can’t say ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ out loud?” she asked.
“I’d rather not.”
“Because it would ruin your big badass thing.”
He whistled the main Star Wars theme as he opened Sarah’s chart and grabbed a pen.
Bree laughed. “Nice. Okay, the roads look good. Some slight snow coverage once you get past Des Moines, but traffic is moving at a normal rate, and crews are out.”
“So I can send my new mom and baby home without worry?” he asked.
“I think they’ll be good,” Bree said.
“Great. Thanks.”
They were quiet for a moment until Bree finally said, “Kit included two smiley-face emojis in her text message earlier.”
Dillon smiled. He really liked Bree. “She usually only uses one?”
“Kit Derby doesn’t use emojis, Dillon,” Bree said.
He liked that, too. “And her text said, Best I ever had, right?”
Bree snorted. “It said, Drinks later?”
Hmm. Well, at least there were emojis. “Ah, so that’s when she’ll give you the best-I’ve-ever-had info,” he said. Though he really did want Kit to tell her friends that.
“You’re kind of pathetic, Dr. Alexander,” Bree informed him. “I love it.”
Yeah, okay, maybe he was. But that didn’t bother him. “We’ll have a sign,” he told her instead of confirming or denying. “When I just happen to show up at A Bar later on.”
Bree snorted again.
Dillon smiled and continued. “If she says I’m the best she’s ever had, when I see you, you pull on your right earlobe. And if she says she’s crazy about me, you itch your nose. And if she says she’s ready to run off and elope, you put your hand over your heart.”
Bree was quiet, probably taking notes on his directions, for a few seconds. Then she said, “And do you know what it will mean if I put my finger up by my temple and rotate it a few times?”
“What?”
“That you’re crazy,” she said with a soft laugh.
“You think I’m crazy?”
“I think that you don’t need signs to figure out how she feels, Dillon,” Bree said, her tone gentler now. “Kit is good at projecting an image. Except when it comes to one thing—you. It’s always been easy to read how she feels about you.”
“It has?”
“You know that. You’ve seen it, too,” Bree told him. “That’s why you keep at her.”
“I keep at her because driving her nuts is really fun.”
“Exactly. And if it weren’t fun, you’d stop. And if she’d ever really given you an indication that she didn’t like it, you wouldn’t think it was fun.”
Dillon thought about that. “You know, hanging out with a shrink might be rubbing off on you.”
“I know.” He could picture the mildly disgusted look on Bree’s face. “Sometimes I just want to drink and bitch, you know? But I always end up with advice.” She said it as if Kit were trying to give her brussels sprouts instead of help.
It was Dillon’s turn to snort. “Well, I appreciate your free advice,” he said.
“Who said anything about that being free? I expect a large order of onion rings to go with my burger when you just happen to show up at A Bar later on,” she said.
When Dillon arrived at the noon meeting, everyone else was already there.
He slipped into the room and then took the chair next to Kit as Don Rickert, the hospital’s CEO, got the meeting started.
Kit shot him a quick smile—that almost knocked him on his ass—but he knew she was surprised he’d sat right next to her. He always sat across the table. It was a better position from which to argue with her. But it made smelling her difficult.
In the past, that had been a good thing. Smelling her made it nearly impossible to concentrate on anything else. But today, he definitely wanted to smell her. And maybe touch her. And maybe lean in to whisper something in her ear.
She always smelled good, but today it seemed that she was drawing him in, pulling him closer, tempting him. And all she was doing was sitting there.
But there seemed something different about her. He couldn’t put his finger on it at first, but then he realized it was how she was sitting. She was leaning back in her chair, one leg crossed over the other, one hand resting on her lap and one on the tabletop. She was listening to the reports from around the table—nursing, radiology, pharmacy—and that’s all she was doing. She wasn’t taking notes; she wasn’t asking questions. Typically she sat up, both elbows on the tabletop, a pen in hand.
He rolled his chair back slightly, wanting to take in the whole picture.
“Dillon, where are we at with your stuff?” he heard Don ask from the head of the table.
Dillon stopped as everyone turned to look at him, including Kit.
“Well . . .” It would be really helpful if he knew what the hell they were talking about. The meeting was about the free clinic. Other than that, he wasn’t sure what they were discussing. All the department heads and then Kit and Dillon, as the instigators of the idea, had been meeting twice a week over the past two months, trying to get things lined up.
“Have you changed your mind about offering walkers and canes and braces?” Kit asked, meeting his eyes.
Right, the equipment. She’d just saved him. Dillon had been asked to look at how to cover the equipment he wanted to provide as a part of the clinic.
“If we want to make equipment available, we’ll have to shift funds,” he said.
Kit frowned at that. “We’d have to shift funds? Meaning we won’t have enough to cover everything?”
Don nodded. “Our projected starting budget is short.”
“What kind of shifts are we talking?” Kit asked Don. Frank Harvey, Chance’s mayor, sat to Don’s right. The free clinic was a big deal for the whole town, and Frank was fully on board. He’d been a big part of early fund-raising. To Don’s left sat Shelly Walker, the woman in charge of the hospital’s foundation.
Shelly spoke up. “We just might have overreached. At least to start. The whole program is impressive, of course, but we just don’t have the resources to do everything you and Dr. Alexander have proposed.”
Kit didn’t look at Dillon, but he knew what she was thinking. This was one more thing they’d always had in common—wanting more and pushing beyond what everyone else could even imagine. They’d done that with their sophomore-class community-service project. The class had wanted to pick up trash or plant flowers at the park. Kit had suggested raising money by doing odd jobs for people around town and using the money to put in some handicapped-accessible equipment in the park instead. Because his mission was to always one-up her, Dillon had added on to the idea and suggested they also do pet care—dog walking, dog washes, dog sitting—and using that money to put a dog park in on the north side. By the time they were done going back and forth, the plan had included a community garden, a new gazebo, and a sand volleyball court.
And in the end, they’d ended up with enough money to add some ramps to the park, and a fence around a square of ground where dogs could run.
“If we shift some of the funds for the geriatric follow-ups, we could cover the equipment,” Dillon told them. They just had to pick out the most important stuff to do first.
“We cut actual medical services?” Karen, the director of nursing, asked.
“No,” Dillon said. “We just need to prioritize where we start. We can do this in stages.” Just like they’d eventually bought a swing that would accommodate a wheelchair and a volleyball net. It had gotten done, and he and Kit had learned a lesson in patience. “We will still see to the primary needs. But the six-month follow-ups can be covered with a class setting. We bring everyone in together and go over education and questions that way, instead of one-on-one.”
Everyone at the table turned to look at Kit as one.
She just blinked at them.
“Kit?” Don asked. “What do you think?”
Right, because this was where she usually jumped in and played devil’s advocate no matter what Dillon said. Dillon prepared himself, fighting a smile at how cute she looked right now. No one ever had to ask her what she thought. She volunteered the information—invitation or not.
“I think it sounds like an acceptable, temporary solution,” she said. “We’ll want to get the follow-ups back into the plan as soon as possible, but if Dillon—Dr. Alexander—thinks the equipment is a primary need, we have to listen to him.”
The entire room was quiet for five beats. Dillon tried to remember the last time he and Kit had agreed on something in one of these meetings without at least two weeks of debate. He couldn’t come up with one.
Don cleared his throat. “Okay, then. Dillon and Kit, can you look at which things to shift where, and we’ll redo the budget. Shelly has a foundation board meeting at the end of the week, so if we could get that before then, that’d be great.”
“No problem,” Dillon told them.
Everyone stood and gathered their pens, papers, and folders. Dillon hung back and was pleased to watch Kit cap, uncap, and then recap her pen four times. She was stalling.
When the last of the committee finally stepped through the door, Dillon turned to her. She had already taken the step that separated them, and as he shifted to lean back against the table, she moved in, against him. Dillon took a huge deep breath and tangled his fingers in her hair, tipping her head back and moving his lips to hover just above hers.
“I made the mistake of sitting next to you,” he said. “I couldn’t wait to see you, and when the seat was open, I went straight for it. Huge mistake.”
“Yeah?”
“I couldn’t sit still or focus. All I could think about was how fucking gorgeous you look and how much I wanted to touch your hair and run my hand up your leg and how I wanted to whisper in your ear that I can still taste you on my tongue.”
Kit drew in a long, shaky breath. “Wow. This could be a problem.”
“It could.” His eyes traveled over her face. “God, you look so beautiful.”
“You like my hair down?”
“Yes. But I like your hair however you wear it. When it’s down, it reminds me of it spread out on the pillow next to me. When it’s up, it makes me want to pull it down and mess it up. But it’s not your hair I’m talking about.”
“What is it?” she asked softly.
“You’re glowing.”
“I’m . . .” She lifted a brow. “I’m glowing?”
He nodded. She was. And he wanted her more than he ever had before. “You are. You look soft. And happy.”
“Oh.” She wet her lips. “I feel soft and happy.”
“Because of me,” he added.
She nodded, and Dillon felt satisfaction burst through his chest.
“This is happening really fast,” she said.
“The fuck it is,” he said quickly. “This has been happening since we were eight.”
She smiled up at him. “Well, maybe eighteen.”
“Sixteen,” he countered.
“Really?”
He nodded. “We were the leads in the school play.” They hadn’t gotten to kiss, much to his disappointment, but they’d had to dance together. “You were graceful and gorgeous and never missed a mark or a line. And then you kicked my ass in the math competition that year. Those two activities alone pretty much illustrated that you’re the whole package. How could I not start falling for you?”
She looked at him for a long moment. Then said, “It was sixteen for me. When you pulled over and changed my car tire in the rain.”
“The soaked shirt did it for you?” he asked with a grin.
She shook her head. “The fact that you pulled over at all. That afternoon I’d called your paper on FDR juvenile. In front of the whole class.”
He remembered the flat tire and the rain. He hadn’t remembered the insult. “That didn’t matter. It was raining; you had a flat. Of course I pulled over,” he said.
She nodded. “And that’s why I started falling.”
He stroked a thumb over her cheek. How had it taken them this long to get to this point? “Let me take you to dinner sometime this week,” he said. “I want to go public. I want to do dirty things to you all night long, too, but after.”
“I’m suddenly really interested in staying in all the time, though,” she said, lifting onto her toes and kissing him.
How many times had he wanted to kiss her in the hospital in the middle of a workday? A thousand. Easily.
Dillon’s hand threaded through her hair, and she gave a soft moan that made him pull her closer. Her belly pressed against the hard length behind his zipper, and he groaned.
“This could be a problem,” he said gruffly as he pulled his mouth away from hers. “Now your lipstick is smudged, and I’ve got a raging hard-on to hide.”
She couldn’t help the sly smile she gave him as she ran her fingers around her lips. “Sorry.” She stepped back, and he stretched to his feet.
He swatted her butt and laughed. “No, you’re not.” He folded her hand in his, and they started for the door. “Oh, by the way, Bree says we have to go out with them Friday night.”
“Yeah, she told me.”
“And you still got me all riled up about staying in?” He pulled the door open and held it as she walked through. “I believe you said all the time.”
“Oh, I would totally cancel on Bree for you,” Kit said. “I’ve been waiting to text her that the meat at A Bar has nothing on what I have at home.”
Dillon laughed and pulled her close to kiss the top of her head. “I love you.”
And then they both froze. Completely, instantly still.
They didn’t make eye contact. They still held hands, but Dillon could feel hers was stiff in his.
His thoughts spun. Should he say something more? He wouldn’t take it back, but yeah, he was as surprised as she was that it had just fallen out like that.
Five seconds ticked by. Then ten.
Finally, Kit said, “I’d better go,” pulled her hand away, and headed down the hall.
“Yep. Okay, me too. See you later.”
But she was too far away to hear that.
Dillon dragged in a deep breath and thrust his hand through his hair. Well, shit. That hadn’t gone as planned. Not that he’d planned to say “I love you” at all. At least, not anytime soon. And he certainly hadn’t planned to just drop it into the middle of a conversation in a random hallway in the hospital.
He’d freaked her out.
But how did she not know that he loved her? Because he did. That realization hit him almost instantly. Hell, he’d told her that he’d been in love with her in high school. That was kind of like what he’d just said.
But it wasn’t. That was in the past and a long time ago and they’d been kids. This was definitely different.
Okay, so what? Maybe he would have preferred to tell her over a romantic candlelit dinner or breakfast in bed. But how could he not love her? And he was the type of guy to say exactly what he was thinking and feeling. Especially to Kit Derby. Besides, in the middle of the day at the hospital after a meeting where they’d agreed to something that would move a mutually beloved project forward actually seemed like the perfect time for them. They weren’t really the romantic-dinner type of couple. They were a fight-like-hell-and-go-to-bed-to-have-amazing-makeup-sex-afterward type of couple.
So she was freaked out now. Fine. He’d fix that. He’d repeat the words, and he’d let her rant about how it was too fast and how he was crazy and how he should have done it differently. And then he’d say the words again. And he’d tell her all the reasons it was true. And he’d kiss her until she melted against him. And said the words back to him.
Dillon took another deep breath and nodded. Yeah, it would be okay. Because he and Kit made a hell of a team, and he fucking loved it. All of it. All of her.
And she was just going to have to deal with the fact that he’d won the first-to-say-I-love-you race.
Kit headed for her office with her heart pounding and a very strange urge to cry. And she didn’t know what she was crying about—was she upset or happy?
It really felt like a little bit of both.
She sat down behind her desk, put her hands palms-down on the cool desktop, closed her eyes, and took a deep cleansing breath. Deep breaths were almost always a good idea.
After about three, she opened her eyes.
Okay, so Dillon had said he loved her.
That was hardly a tragedy. That was . . . kind of amazing. Dillon was an amazing guy. He could have his pick of women. And yet, he had a thing for Kit.
That was pretty cool.
It was also . . . progress. Dillon wasn’t her patient, but he was someone she’d studied for a long time. He had lost someone significant in his life. He’d left town and his family because of that loss. Now she knew that there was more there than grief or guilt. And it really broke her heart to think that Dillon would ever question his capacity to care and love. But this . . . Falling in love with someone else, telling that person how he felt, that was big.
If she didn’t think too hard about the fact that the person was her, she could truly appreciate Dillon’s growth from a very professional perspective.
Of course, it was her . . .
Kit pulled out her notebook and made some professional notes about what falling in love and being able to really pursue it and admit it and express it meant for Dillon.
Then she closed her notebook, closed her eyes . . . and freaked out a little.
Dillon was in love with her. Dillon had worked through his issues, realized that he did process emotions, and then he’d turned those emotions to her.
Her heart pounded, and her thoughts spun.
Finally, Kit picked up her phone. Everyone, even shrinks, needed people to talk to sometimes. Both Bree and Avery were at work and couldn’t just drop everything. Especially because this was hardly a crisis. This was just . . . unexpected.
She texted them both. Dillon’s in love with me.
Avery’s reply took only about five seconds. We know.
Bree took a little longer, but her answer was all Bree: Duh.
Kit looked at both answers. And breathed again. Then felt her mouth curling into a smile. Okay, so maybe this wasn’t so unexpected. It wasn’t crazy, she supposed. She and Dillon had a long history. They had mutual respect, they shared a lot of similar interests and passions—medicine, helping people, Chance, their friends and families—and they had amazing chemistry.
Kit thought about Avery and Bree. They’d both fallen for guys they had long, pretty complicated histories with, too. And they were happy. She had no delusions that things were always perfect and that the guys didn’t still drive them nuts sometimes—and vice versa—but they would rather be with Jake and Max than without. That Kit knew for sure.
And she knew that now that Dillon was back in Chance, living and working and playing and making her crazy, she wouldn’t want him to ever be anywhere else, doing anything else.
She wet her lips and texted him—I’m definitely canceling on Bree Friday.
His response was almost immediate. You’ll want to cancel any early-morning plans, too.
She smiled. Then laughed. Out loud. Then she sent a message to Megan to move her Saturday-morning appointments back two hours.
“We’re calling an emergency meeting for noon today,” Helen Litner told Kit two weeks later as Kit scrolled through her e-mails at her desk.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Helen, I can’t make it.”
There was a beat of silence from Helen, but finally she said, “You can’t make it?”
“I’m sorry. I already have a meeting at noon today.” Kit smiled as she looked at the two dozen yellow roses on the corner of her desk.
They had arrived that morning with a card that said simply, I meant what I said.
They were, of course, from Dillon, and even though they’d said a lot of things in the past two weeks, Kit knew what he was referring to.
The I love you.
He hadn’t said it again. She hadn’t said it to him yet. But they’d both sure as hell been acting like it.
They’d been out to dinner in Chance four times. They’d hung out with their friends. She’d gone to Sunday brunch at his grandmother’s house. He came to her office for lunch every day—her noon meeting today—and they were just generally sickeningly happy and all over each other.
And no one—not friends, not family, not neighbors—acted surprised. At all.
“But we’re going to be deciding who’s in charge of the various events for Founder’s Day,” Helen said, as if that would sway Kit’s decision.
“I know. But I can’t make it,” Kit repeated.
“You don’t want to be in charge of anything?”
Helen’s tone of voice indicated that she had never heard of such a thing. And, frankly, she probably hadn’t. Kit was always in charge of something. Or everything.
“We have many good leaders on our committee,” Kit said. “I know that the Founder’s Day celebration will be fabulous no matter who’s in charge.”
It, admittedly, felt a little strange to say that. Kit had a small notebook full of notes she’d taken after last year’s Founder’s Day that would make this one so much better. But she had a lot going on. With the free clinic and the disaster resource center and—
There was a knock on the frame of her door, and she looked up to see Dillon leaning against the doorjamb looking gorgeous. She felt the huge grin that stretched her face.
Seeing him in his scrubs and lab coat did something funny to her insides. She’d seen him earlier in the hallway, and he’d given her a private smile and wink, and she’d been stunned by how turned on she’d gotten. Because that morning he’d pulled her into “their” storage closet, the one where they’d taken cover during the tornado six months ago, and had dropped those scrub pants and rocked her world.
“Helen Litner,” she mouthed to Dillon.
He rolled his eyes as he stepped across the threshold of her office. She watched as he shut the door, pressed the lock, and shrugged out of his lab coat.
Her pulse began hammering as he approached.
“Helen, honestly, I’m happy to help however I can,” she said to the older woman as Dillon stopped by her chair and rotated it to face him.
“Donna thinks that she can take over the cook-off and the parade, but we both know that won’t work,” Helen said.
Dillon dropped to his knees in front of Kit and uncrossed her legs. Her breathing instantly went ragged.
“Everything will be fine,” Kit told Helen.
Dillon’s hands settled on the outside of her thighs, and he started inching her skirt up. Her eyes went wide, but he wasn’t looking at her face.