Page 24 of Igniting Her

“Tell me.”

“This conversation is inappropriate.”

Ellie’s voice rose over the rain. “You had your forearm across my chest for two extra seconds. You looked at me across that bay like you were waiting to see if I’d come closer. Last night you almost kissed me. We passed inappropriate three exits ago.”

Cassie kept four feet between them; it didn’t feel like enough. “I stopped.”

“Two seconds after I tapped.”

Cassie’s hand closed around the edge of the console table. “You tapped. I held you after you ended the hold. I was wrong. A tap means immediate release.”

Ellie’s anger checked without disappearing. “Then don’t do it again.”

“I won’t. If you say stop, tap, pull away—anything—I release you at once. Every time.”

“Good.” Ellie took one measured breath. “Now stop using one failure as permission to erase everything else.”

“I recognized the error.”

“I’m not an error,” Ellie said pointedly.

“I didn’t say you were.”

“You keep looking at me like one.”

“I look at you like a firefighter under my command.”

“No, you don’t.” Ellie came one step closer. “You correct me like one. You assign me like one. On the line, you trust me like one. Then you look at me like this, and suddenly I’m a problem you can solve by going quiet.”

“You are under my command. That is not a detail we can remove because neither of us likes it.”

“I know exactly who signs my evaluations.”

“Do you?” Cassie’s voice cut through the rain without rising. “I decide your assignments. I can discipline you. I can affect whether you advance in this department. Anything that happens in this house follows us back to the station whether we acknowledge it or not.”

“Then judge my work by my work.”

“I have.”

“Have you?”

Cassie’s control tightened. “You think the extra drills were personal.”

“I think you’ve been harder on me from the day I walked in,” Ellie responded.

“Because you’re gifted enough to make carelessness look like courage.”

Anger shifted in Ellie’s face. Cassie should not have said anything that sounded so much like praise.

“On that mountain,” Ellie said, quieter now, “you knew I wouldn’t let the line fail.”

“Yes.”

“You put the crew behind me.”

“Because you had earned their trust.”

“Yours too?” The professional answer should have been immediate. Cassie could not give it, and Ellie saw. “That’s what I thought.”