Page 48 of A Deal with the Devil

When I wake, the room is sunlit and Hayes is leaning over me, taking my temperature. His hair is messy from sleep, eyes a little hooded. This must be what he looks like when he wakes up—soft and delicious. He catches me looking and that signature smirk pulls at the side of his mouth.

“Good morning, sunshine. Your fever’s gone. How do you feel?”

“Like I was placed in a crane and repeatedly slammed into a brick wall.” And like someone who apparently took off her clothes and vomited in front of her hot boss. I flinch hard at the memory. “Sorry about, um, every single thing I did and said over the past twenty-four hours.”

“You’re pretty cute when you’re sick,” he says, perching on the edge of the bed. “And I do have all the photos of you stripped down to your bra and panties, so it’s not like I got nothing out of the deal.”

I laugh. “You earned them. I’m just glad I don’t remember most of it.”

He bites down on a smile. “You were your normal prickly self for the most part, although you did at one point suggest I smell like heaven. And then you carped at me for calling the trash can a bin and said I need to ‘stop speaking British all the time’ because I’ve been here too long for that.”

I struggle to sit up. He’s got me cocooned in approximately a hundred blankets. “Well, it is sort of ridiculous,” I mutter. “You’ve been here nearly a decade.”

I swing my legs off the side of the bed, careful not to flash him in the process and scurry to the bathroom. I wish very much that Hayes wasn’t sitting ten feet away while I pee. “Why is it so cold in here?” I shout from behind the closed door.

“Because you complained,” he says in a raised voice. “And now you’re complaining again, while urinating, like the refined little lady you are, so I’ll change the temperature once more.” How he manages to make me smile when I’m feeling like crap is a mystery and one I’m not going to think about while I’m half naked in his bathroom.

I wash my hands and brush my teeth with a new toothbrush I find in the medicine cabinet. I still look like garbage, but when I return to the room, he’s not looking at my face...he’s looking at my breasts—well-displayed thanks to the thin T-shirt and arctic temperature in here. His eyes dart away quickly, but two spots of color remain on his cheekbones.

The completely shameless Hayes Flynn is unsettled by headlights. Even in my unwell state, it’s surprisingly thrilling to see I can affect him at all.

I cross the room to my dress, which is draped over a chair.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he demands.

“Going home. I like my neighbors, but not well enough to walk around them in nothing but a T-shirt.”

“Get your ass back in bed,” he says, making his Very, Very Angry Face and rising to his feet. “You’ve barely eaten or had anything to drink in over a day, and an hour ago, you were sleeping so heavily even Marta cleaning in here didn’t wake you. You’re not going anywhere.”

I’d like to argue, but the truth is, my legs are starting to wobble, I’m freezing cold, and that bed looks like the blissful, lava-hot cocoon of my dreams. I sink into it.

“I love this bed,” I murmur as he takes a seat again. “Would you allow it to marry me? You can take the cost out of my salary.”

He gives me a small smile. “Only if you let me watch the honeymoon.”

“This is the honeymoon, right here.” I pull the covers to my chin. “A perfect one, where I sleep and it cuddles me and doesn’t talk.”

“Once again confirming your boyfriend’s decision to stray was not completely unwarranted.”

I laugh. Weirdly, it doesn’t even hurt. “Go to work. I’ll sleep for a few hours and be on my way.”

“I already canceled everything,” he says.

I can barely get him to take an hour for lunch, but he cancelled an entire day’s appointments for me. Why? He could easily have outsourced this, dragged some poor nurse or resident over here if he was particularly worried. But instead, he watched over me himself.

His unexpected sweetness…is equal parts pleasure and pain for me. Maybe it’s just that it’s in moments like this I realize how lonely I’ve been, how badly I want to feel as if someone cares. But it’s also that there’s this whole side to him that seems to remain hidden. And I wish it wasn’t.

“Why did you decide to become a doctor?” I ask as I turn to my side to face him fully, pulling a soft pillow under my cheek. “Was that always what you wanted to do?”

“I did not come out of the womb aspiring to it, no,” he says. “I spent a few years wanting to play for Manchester United like everyone else.” He rests his hands over his stomach, knees braced apart, thin sleep pants pulling tight over his thighs. Why did I not notice what he was wearing before now?

“But why?” I persist.

He shrugs. “This bird hit the side of our house one day. I put it in a box and decided to care for it. The bird died, but I got it in my head that maybe I could learn how to take care of people instead.” Everything about his voice and expression seems bored, as if none of this matters. I’ve learned with Hayes, that’s usually a sign it does.

“And why plastic surgery?”

“I saw a documentary about Operation Smile,” he says. He leans forward and fixes the top blanket, smoothing it over me. The pressure of his hand, even through three blankets, has me arching into his touch involuntarily. He must notice, because his eyes flick to mine for a brief second. He clears his throat and continues. “They perform cleft palate surgeries on children in third world countries. I was young and idealistic at the time, and it seemed like I could do some good there.”