Page 23 of Hungry Like the Wolf

“Wait,” she said, shaking her senses back into her head. “You made an appointment without checking my credentials?”

Robbie shrugged. “I made an appointment because Hank said you were the best.”

“Oh,” she said, lightheaded again for no good reason, which was a refreshing change from being lightheaded from hunger.

She should step away. She was upright. She was balanced. She wasn’t falling anymore. But every time she tried, she just… didn’t.

JJ cleared his throat, and she looked at him, at the raised eyebrows and wide eyes that said, “What do we have here?”

That was enough to remind her of the situation, of her place within it. Robbie was her client. She was his therapist. She was meant to be helping him.

She slid sideways. Robbie released her immediately, stepping forward to snatch his black boxer briefs from the pile at the top of the steps. She closed her eyes as he stepped into them, not wanting to see the white inside of his thighs as he lifted a foot into the leg of the briefs.

Actually, she did want to see that thigh, but that was the problem.

He’s your client. He’s your client. Godsdamnit, Nadja, he’s your client.

When she finally opened her eyes, he had his jeans back on, though that only made him look sexier somehow, the way they hung low and drew her attention to the words “You do not have to be good” just above the waistband.

She was doomed.

“Well, I’ll leave you kids to it,” JJ said, pulling his shirt on. “I’ll drop some more clothes by tomorrow morning. Can’t guarantee what they’ll be, other than clean, but it beats wearing the same thing every day. We missed pack dinner, but there’s always some unperishables in the cabinet that you can make do with tonight. But for tomorrow, pack dinner is at six. It’s spaghetti night.”

With that, he took off back toward the majority of the cabins, leaving Nadja and Robbie behind. Alone.

He was looking at her and, for maybe the first time, she saw him. Not the anxiety, which had been rolling off of him in waves this morning. Not the pain and agony of the rest of the day. Him. The way his whiskey-colored eyes looked so sharp and perceptive, the way his side ribs expanded with his inhales, the little snarl toward the left side of his top lip, like he’d had a bad cut that healed crooked.

He had what one of her clients called “kind eyes.” At the time, Nadja had nodded even though she hadn’t the slightest idea what that meant. People could be kind—or unkind—at will. How you could tell a person’s threshold for kindness just by looking in their eyes?

But then she realized how very seldom she actually looked at people’s eyes when she spoke to or with them. Eye contact made her uncomfortable. It always had. And she’d learned to look at the little divot between their eyebrows instead so they felt as if she was looking at them, but she didn’t have to sit with the writhing discomfort of actually doing so.

But she was meeting his gaze now, his kind gaze. She understood now.

She swallowed against the lump in her throat, pushing her bobbed hair behind her ear. “We need to talk.”

CHAPTER 10

The cabin was cozy and clean. Braided rag rugs littered the floor, and an old plaid couch with wooden legs rested against the side wall. There was no TV, but where one might have sat, there was a shelf of dozens of worn paperbacks, the spines cracked and faded from hand after hand. The kitchen was at the back of the cabin, and to the left, he saw two closed doors and a bathroom.

JJ had told him there were two bedrooms in the cabin. It had seemed like a strange detail. Surely Nadja would be heading back to World’s End. Why did it matter that there were two beds?

She was in the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets.

“Score!” he heard her exclaim before the distinctive sound of ice cubes hitting the bottom of a glass filtered out into the living room.

When she returned, she had two glasses of ice water in her hands. There were cork coasters on the table, and she placed the waters on top of them before sitting in a recliner that looked identical to the one his Papaw used in the 1990s. And in the nineties, that chair was already more than twenty years old.

He sat on the couch and rested his elbows on his knees. He didn’t know Nadja, but he knew people. She was nervous. He could tell by the way her hands never stopped moving.

“So,” he said.

“So,” she repeated.

“You wanted to talk.”

She blew out a gust of breath. “Yeah.”

“Before we do, can I ask you a question?”