Let Me In. Donna Kauffman

looking too hot, either.”

      He carefully tried to curl fingers in both hands, wanting to gauge her assessment personally.

      “Honestly, what part of no moving didn’t you understand?” She trapped his wrists with the palms of her hands, her touch gentle, but restraining nonetheless. “You’re in my cabin. You’re on my bed. I haven’t alerted anyone to your presence here. All three of those things will change if you don’t do as I say.”

      He closed his eyes again, mercifully escaping the piercing light. “Bossy.”

      “I learned from the bossiest.”

      A chuckle rumbled in his chest without his permission. “True,” he managed, even as he winced through the renewed daggers of pain.

      She pressed the straw against his lips. “Drink.”

      He sipped, but this time the taste was bitter. He immediately clamped his lips and tried to pull back.

      “I’m not poisoning you,” she told him, sounding more weary than pissed. “Trust me, if I was going to do something to you, it would be direct and unadulterated. I’m trying to give you something to ease the pain. You can’t swallow pills, so I crushed up some pain reliever. Just sip as much as you can. I’d give you something stronger, but I don’t know what they pumped into your system.”

      “Don’t…want that.”

      “You can handle some ibuprofen. That’s all this is. I won’t give you anything stronger.”

      He relaxed again. “Okay.” He sipped. A little pain reliever probably wouldn’t begin to touch the problems he was currently dealing with, but it sure as hell couldn’t hurt.

      “I’m going to make some soup. We’ll see if you can get a little of that down.”

      He nodded once, but he was starting to slip away again, and that was all he could manage. As sleep claimed him, he was faintly aware that this time it was just that, sleep. The room didn’t feel like it was spinning. And he still had control of his thoughts. Maybe the fog was finally starting to lift.

      “I’ll check back in on you. Don’t do anything stupid.”

      He didn’t smile at that. He’d already done something so monumentally stupid, he couldn’t possibly do anything worse.

      He’d told her he was sorry, but that didn’t begin to cover the depth of his remorse. She still had no idea how badly he’d fucked things up.

      But she was going to.

      He just had to hurry the hell up and heal enough so he’d be the one to tell her what lay in store. And not the guys with the tranquilizer guns and the happy juice.

      Chapter 3

      Tate leaned on the doorjamb and watched him sleep. At least it seemed as if he was sleeping now. He was resting more peacefully, at any rate. Far better than the fitful, twitchy, complete-with-delirious-rambling unconsciousness that had passed for sleep the last time he’d checked out on her.

      She tried not to think about some of those ramblings. In his drug-induced delirium, her name had been on his lips more than once. And not in a professional, teamwork kind of way.

      She shifted her weight, crossed her arms more tightly, as the echo of those feverish, highly sexually-oriented ramblings made her body twitch in ways it hadn’t in a very, very long time. And had absolutely no business twitching now.

      All the rest of her parts, however, ached with fatigue. And yet, she knew another cup of coffee was going to be necessary, as sleep was a commodity she wasn’t going to be able to indulge in quite yet. She could smell the fresh pot she’d put on as it began to percolate. The rich scent alone was enough to both perk up her brain synapses and make her feel a bit queasy, all at the same time. She’d really rather just close her eyes for a few hours. “Dream on,” she murmured, still standing in the doorway, watching him.

      She found her gaze once again roaming over his body. He’d always been well-muscled, but not big or bulky. He moved quickly, economically, always in control, and light on his feet. More panther than lion. He generally slipped into whatever space he chose to occupy, rather than stride his way into it. He was stealthy with his dominance, rather than overt or kingly, despite his leadership position.

      So it surprised her how overly large he seemed to her now, in the way he dominated the space in her bed. It was a big bed. A sea of bed, actually. She didn’t like small spaces, didn’t like to feel limited in her range of motion, even if she didn’t use it or need it. She needed to know it was there, the room, the space.

      She knew quite well that need was tied directly to her time spent in captivity and didn’t really give a flat damn what that said about how well and thoroughly she’d healed. She’d healed more than she’d ever expected possible. So if she wanted to sleep spread-eagled on a mattress the size of Kansas, she wasn’t going to apologize to anyone about it.

      She covered her mouth with her fist as a yawn overtook her, which made her feel every tense fiber in her neck and shoulders. She was exhausted from the lack of sleep, but hauling his half-dead weight into her bedroom—and away from that giant picture window in her living room—before the sun came up hadn’t exactly helped matters. He’d been back in her world less than twenty-four hours, and she needed him to wake the hell up so he could help her come to terms with exactly what his intrusion was going to do to her.

      Her innate training had kicked in whether she wanted it to or not, and she realized she’d been subconsciously making damage-control lists almost from the time he’d collapsed on her floor. First order of business was to make sure he was stabilized and secure. He was still fighting off the effects of his injuries and whatever drugs had been pumped into him, but he was no longer bound, he’d been given sips of water, and he was as comfortable as he could be. She still needed to strip him and clean up whatever wounds he might have, do a more thorough investigation of his injuries, but getting him into bed had been an epic struggle, done in fits and spurts whenever he was lucid enough to help her maneuver his weight. At the moment, that was going to have to be enough.

      Moving him off the floor had been a risk, as she couldn’t be a hundred percent certain there weren’t life-threatening internal injuries, but given his continued improvement, and the fact that she couldn’t haul him into the nearest emergency room no matter what shape he was truly in, she’d done what she thought was most important.

      Which was to make him comfortable and get him out of any possible public view. There were windows along the back wall of her bedroom, but as the rear of her cabin jutted out over a steep hill, someone would have to either be sitting on the deck which circled the back of her home, or have shimmied very high up into some skinny pine trees, to get into binocular—or scope—range. Not that there weren’t agents who could pull that off, but it was unlikely. She’d done a thorough visual scan of the rear area anyway. Because unlikely didn’t mean impossible.

      As soon as she could be relatively certain he wouldn’t do anything to further harm himself—or her—she needed to get outside and repair the obvious signs he had to have left in his drugged and disoriented trek to her front door. They might not be obvious to a neighbor or casual passerby, not that she had any of those way out here, but anyone who was actually looking for him would find a trail as easily as if he’d left bread crumbs.

      If they hadn’t already.

      “What in the hell did you think you were doing?” she murmured, tucking suddenly cold hands deeper under her arms. It was little comfort. It was frustrating, the lack of progress she’d made so far in information gathering. She knew he’d been watching her, that he might have even been in the cabin at some point. What she didn’t know was why. She did know that someone had found out, or found him, and beaten and drugged him. And that it might have something to do with CJ being alive. It made her heart clutch and her mind flinch every time she allowed her thoughts to go there. So she did her damndest not to. She’d get to all that eventually, process it, deal with it, but to do that she had to get to him