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He was staring at her intently, she could tell, but if she
could only keep her eyes on the tray in her two hands or on the clinical green
of the floor or on nothing, nothing at all, everything would be okay.
    She was Nurse Kent, professional. He was a blank spot who
needed cleaning and fixing.
    Lord, she didn’t know how she was going to get through this.
Even if she managed to pretend he didn’t exist, somehow, at some point she was
going to have to run her hands all over his naked body. And something about
that just seemed desperately unfair.
    Who on earth had ever thought of this stupid practice?
Couldn’t they clean themselves, for God’s sake? Well, the ones who no longer
had hands probably couldn’t clean themselves, but as far as she knew Connor
still totally had those two appendages.
    Unless they’d taken them on the day she’d been away from
him. Oh God, what if they’d taken his hands or worse, his face, or even worse
than that his gorgeous, amazing—
    She breathed out, long and slow. No, no, no—his hands and
face were still there. And his…other thing was still there too. She could see
it beneath the bed sheet, already too thick and probably halfway to hardness
and oh this was all just a mess.
    “I thought I’d never see you again,” he said, which just
made it even more of a mess. At least if he’d said something simple and
straightforward like, Oh, I see my half-hard cock is making you wet again, she could have pretended there was just a weird sexual current between them.
    No deep sadness and sweet longing. No hearts and flowers and
other things that probably didn’t even exist anymore, up there in the world
she’d never seen.
    “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m your nurse.”
    There. That straightened things out. Now he could see what a
professional she was, and absolutely nothing more.
    “Yeah, but last time you did things that most nurses—”
    “Let’s talk about something else!” she said, only it came
out way too shrill. It almost sounded like the morning whistle blowing—that’s
how shrill it was.
    But it made him quiet. She could hear him shifting on the
bed, but that didn’t really count as noise. Her own tremulous breathing—that
counted as noise. The way her own chest was rising and falling, and her uniform
was chafing against her burning-hot body—that counted as noise.
    It sounded loud enough to block out rational thought in her
head.
    “Well, I wasn’t going to mention it…” he started, and she
willed him not to finish his sentence, oh how she willed him not to. “But then
I realized how desperately aroused you are and it seemed sort of rude not to.”
    She whipped her gaze to his, immediately. Was he messing
with her? Was that the ways things were now? She’d touched him intimately, so
he got to make little barbed comments about her ridiculous horniness while his
eyes fixed on her in some awful, hungry sort of way?
    She didn’t think so. Oh no, she didn’t think so.
    She snapped around and faced the little table by his bed,
back almost to him. Hands busy with very important nursing kinds of things. And
if her legs were sort of trembling as she did them, well, it didn’t mean
anything. It just meant she’d had a hard, hungry day—because of him—and she had
a tough, annoying task ahead of her—also because of him.
    If he didn’t want to do anything to make those problems
better, he could just go screw.
    “Serena,” he said, which was almost as bad as the arousal
comment. The urge to spit at him that he shouldn’t call her by her first name
swelled up inside her, large and black and awful, just awful.
    But then, if she did he’d never call her by her first name
again. If she snapped at him, he’d probably retreat and then what? They’d go
all the way back to cold silences and empty nothingness, until one day some
doctor would give her a card saying he’d died and she’d been moved to Ward Three.
    “Serena, I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said,