Page 21 of The Mobster’s Nurse

I reach for the cloth hanging from the stall rail. Clean her skin carefully. She lets me. Then hang the riding crop back onto the peg next to the cleaning cloth.

Ellie

He's gentle about it.

That's the thing I'll turn over later, in the privacy of my own room, when all of this is just memory, and I'm trying to make sense of it. He was gentle about it. This enormous, dangerous, coiled-up man with his mob money and his cold eyes and his reputation preceding him — he cleaned the evidence of himself off my skin like it was a privilege, not an afterthought.

I pull my clothes back on. My hands are steadier than I expect them to be.

He watches me the whole time. Not hungry now — or not only hungry. Something else too. Something I don't have a word for yet, or maybe I have words for it, but I'm not willing to say them, not even inside my own head.

Not about a man I met thirty-six hours ago.

"You're thinking very loudly," he says.

"I think loudly. I know. It's a character flaw."

"It's not." He reaches out. Tucks a piece of hair behind my ear with a deliberateness that makes my chest ache. "It's one of my favorite things about you already."

Already. That word alone hits me. Like there's going to be more. Like this is a beginning, not a moment that ends when I walk out of these stables and back into my actual life.

I should tell him that's not how this works. That I have a job here and he has enemies and the world outside that door is complicated and dangerous, and none of this makes any sense.

Instead, I hear myself say: "What happens now?"

He considers me. Like, the question deserves real thought, and he’s going to give it real thought because I asked it, and that means it matters.

"Now," he says, "you go back to your day. And I go back to mine."

"And?"

"And tonight, Ellie—" he tips my chin up, "—you'll think about what you want. Not what's sensible. Not what's safe. What you want. And tomorrow you'll tell me."

"What if I don't know?"

"Then I'll wait," he says simply. Like that's obvious. Like it costs him nothing. Like a man with his kind of power has all the patience in the world when it matters to him. "I'll wait as long as you need."

I look at him for a long moment. Looking for the angle, the play, the thing underneath the thing. I've spent my whole adult life being good at reading people. I can usually find the seam.

I can't find the seam.

"Okay," I say finally.

He steps back. Gives me room. Puts himself back together with the efficient calm of a man who does not rattle easily, though I know now — I know for certain — that he rattles. That underneath all that composure is a pulse that ran fast when I held his wrist. That underneath all that control is a man who told me he'd wait, and meant it.

I move toward the stable door.

"Ellie."

I look back.

"For what it's worth," he says, and his voice is quiet now, stripped of the growl and the command, just a man saying something true, "I know what you were trying to tell me. Earlier. Before you could get the words out."

He lets that sit there between us.

"I'm glad you found them," he says.

I turn before he can see what that does to my face.