Ryan (Mallick Brothers 2)

In the backseat, Rocky had accepted his imprisonment and stopped shrieking and thrashing.

And that helped lessen the anxiety as well.

By the time he climbed back in, I felt mostly myself again. I was a little frazzled. My skin felt tingly and my heart was still beating a little hard and I was a bone-deep kind of exhausted from the aftermath of the adrenaline surge, but I wasn't freaking. Much.

"You alright?" his voice asked, unexpected. It had been so long since there was any other voice around me except for my uncle's visits and the scheduled appointments with Bry that it was startling to hear it.

I jerked slightly, my fingers involuntarily tightening on his, as my gaze flew up to his face. "What?" I asked, blinking twice as his piercing blue eyes pinned mine.

"The peroxide," he explained, making my gaze fly down to where my hand was somehow dripping, though I hadn't felt the spray at all.

"Oh, ah, yeah," I said, looking back up, giving him a somewhat clumsy smile. "Didn't even feel it," I explained.

And it was right about then that I realized my fingers had relaxed on his from their little involuntary spasm, but his were holding mine tightly.

My heart, yeah, it stopped pounding so damn hard for a second so it could do a strange, delicious little flip-flop thing that made an unfamiliar warmness spread across my whole chest.

Human contact. I had forgotten what it was like.

I felt the peroxide bottle slide down on the seat along my thigh to rest near my butt as a crinkling sound made my brows draw together for a second before he brought up a little round packaged roll of gauze up to his mouth and nipped the side, ripping it open.

So he didn't have to release my hand to use it to open it.

"I, um, I don't think gauze is necessary," I forced myself to say though the larger part of me really, really wanted him to wrap my hand for reasons I was choosing not to analyze.

You have to actively make an effort to stop the swirling thoughts, Dusty.

That'd be my therapist, Amy, talking.

She insisted I call her that too- Amy. Not Dr. Robertson. I guess it was some technique they were taught at school or something to help patients feel more at ease. Kind of how she didn't call us "patients" either, but "clients". Why, I wasn't sure. I was definitely sick. I was absolutely a patient. It was a completely appropriate term. But maybe it was easier for people stubbornly stationed in denial to accept themselves as a client instead of a patient.

So, I was going to try to follow her advice. I wasn't going to overthink anything that happened in his car.

You know, at least until I was shut in my apartment again.

Then, oh yeah, I was going to analyze it to freaking death.

"Better safe," he said, shrugging, giving my fingers one last small squeeze before releasing them so he could use both hands to wrap me up. My gaze went down, not wanting to be a creep who kept staring at his face, and watched as he quickly, but super carefully wrapped me up. "Ryan," he said a moment later as he stuck the little metal doohickey on to hold the gauze together.

"I'm sorry?" I asked, looking up to find him watching me.

"Ryan Mallick, my name," he said with a small nod.

Right.

I knew that.

Because, like I said, I occasionally watched him. And that meant I also saw his brothers sometimes and they called him Ry and Ryan and also, I once got a letter in my pile of his. So I had shot it across the hall and under his door because I couldn't bring myself to hand it to him.

"And you're Dusty," he said, my name in his smooth voice sending a weird shiver across my skin. "Interesting name."

"My mom was, ah..." what was a nice way to say it? "A bit of a hippie. So I got branded with Dusty Rose Sunshine McRae."

"Sunshine, huh?" he asked, smile teasing up in a way that made his very stern face seem warm and inviting. "I guess I can see that." Then, before I could fall half in love with him right then and there, he moved backward, settling my hand onto my own thigh, and completely cutting off all contact.

I was unreasonably sad at the lack of it as I reached for the bottle of peroxide and found the cap, just to have something to do.

"Sorry I dragged you out of there," he said a while later as I completely reassembled the contents of the first aid kit he had made a mess of, crumbling up the used wrapper for the gauze and sticking it in my pocket, then slipping the whole kit back in the glove compartment.