Mount Mercy

“You’re more than anyone here gives you credit for,” he said. “You hide away but you shouldn’t hide.” Each word was low and heavy, big ingots of silver that sunk into my soul. The cocky, teasing tone was gone. His voice came from somewhere down deep.

His hand moved from my cheek, sliding up over my temple, his fingers pushing under my surgical cap and smoothing over my pinned-back hair. I felt the cap tumble to the floor. “You drive me... fucking…. crazy,” he told me. With each word, his voice grew tighter and my breathing grew faster. For the first time, there wasn’t any of my usual me?! His voice didn’t allow any argument.

His thumb stroked my hair, following its lines, and I felt the tiny tremble in his hand. God, his whole body had gone taut, quaking with the effort of holding back. “There’s a sink behind you,” he said. “Do you know what I want to do?” His other hand was suddenly on my waist, warm through the thin fabric. “I want to shove these down your legs,”—the edge of his hand nudged the waistband of my scrub pants—“and pick you up, sit you on the edge and just fuck you right here.” He leaned in even closer, his lips right at my ear, and his voice became a growl wrapped around a core of molten silver. “I want all of you. I want your tits and your legs and your arse and your sweet, shy—”

He didn’t say the last word. He breathed it. In his accent, it was transformed, those four letters turned from something ugly and course into something reverent but just as hotly forbidden. It soaked straight to my core and became a thrashing, urgent heat, an ache between my thighs. I wanted him. I wanted him more than I’ve ever wanted anything. My breath came in halting, frantic pants. I was delirious for this man.

“But…” His face twisted with the effort of saying it. I felt the muscles in his arms straining. “I...can’t....do that. You deserve better than a quick fuck, Beckett.” My surname wasn’t formal, anymore. It was a pet name, a codename more intimate than Amy could ever be. “You deserve the fairy tale.”

I blinked up at him. He sunk his fingertips into my hair for a second and then started to withdraw that hand and it felt like a knife being drawn from me. I clamped my own hand on top of it, holding it on me. I just couldn’t bear to let this go. “Then—Then don’t make it a quick—Do...do more! I—” I struggled to put it into words: an invisible ocean current that was barreling me towards him, unstoppable. “I really like you!” I said at last, and cursed myself because that didn’t even begin to describe it.

But it didn’t matter because immediately, I saw it in his eyes: he felt it, too. “We could...be together,” I said. Dating. A relationship. Something. I didn’t care. I just couldn’t go back to being alone. Everything that had seemed so perfect, before he came along, so safe and warm, suddenly seemed so dark and cold.

Both of his hands found my cheeks, now. His thumbs slowly rubbed over my cheekbones as if he was memorizing them, making the most of what would be our very last contact. “No, Beckett. We couldn’t. I can’t give you that.”

I just stared up at him, shell-shocked by what I heard in his voice. He was trapped, wrapped in chains and weighted to the ocean bed. He couldn’t surface, however much he wanted to. And he didn’t want me to have just the fake him, all arrogance and swagger, the him he showed everyone else.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I nodded. Felt hot tears weighing my eyes and blinked furiously. “Your neck’s going to need stitches,” I told him. “Come on. I’ll do it.”

He gazed at me for a beat, those beautiful eyes full of pain at hurting me. But then he nodded. He understood. If this was it, forever, then I needed to get straight back to working with him, to prove to myself I could. He led the way out of the locker room and I grabbed my surgical cap and followed, silently wiping my eyes on my sleeve.

In Exam One, I sat him on the table and busied myself setting up a light just right, and getting the suture kit ready, and generally anything that meant I didn’t have to think about what we’d just lost. I was about to pull the curtain closed when Corrigan put his hand on my arm. “Hey!” he called to someone in the hallway. When the man spun around, startled, I saw it was Seth. Colt’s son. He’d been talking to Taylor and the expression on both their faces, the way their cheeks colored, eased my pain a little. They were just so sweet together. At least someone’s happy.