we’re even,” he said, trying valiantly to put her at ease. “Though I think I’ve mentioned before that we should stop meeting like this.”
She groaned weakly—at his attempt at humor or because of pain and humiliation, he wasn’t so certain.
“We’re not even,” she decided. “We’d be even if you had ever been embarrassed about being unclothed, which I suspect you never have been.”
He didn’t say anything.
“In your whole life.”
He still didn’t say anything.
“Have you?” she demanded.
“Uh, well, you’re not exactly unclothed. You must have pulled down the shower curtain when you came out of the shower enclosure. You’re decent.”
“My shower curtain is transparent,” she said through clenched teeth.
“I’m not looking.”
Of course her eyes flew open just as he looked. “Just for injuries!”
She clenched her eyes tightly shut again.
“I’m going to help you get up.”
“No, you aren’t!” She tried to tuck the transparent shower curtain tighter around her. It had the unfortunate result of becoming even more transparent.
“Ah, yes, I am,” he said, keeping his eyes on her face. Chaos had struck. And all that discipline was paying off, after all. He could look just at her face. Couldn’t he?
“I can get up myself.” She wiggled ineffectually this way and that, trying to figure out how to get up on the slippery floor and keep the small protection of the shower curtain around her at the same time. She gave up with a sigh.
He reached out to help her.
“Don’t touch me.” She slapped at his hand, but it was halfhearted.
“You can trust me.” His hand closed around hers, and this time she surrendered. “I have pretty extensive first-aid training.”
“Yes, I know.”
He lifted an eyebrow at her.
“I read about it. On the internet. The SEALs.”
“Oh.” She had read about what he’d done for a living. He contemplated that.
“Not that I was spying.”
“No, of course not.”
“Just intrigued.”
“Ah.”
“It seems like you have done very dangerous things.”
“Yes.”
Her voice suddenly went very soft. “Things that make a man very lonely.”
Her eyes felt as if they were looking deep within him, as if she could see his soul, as if she could see the vast emptiness that was there. Her hand tightened marginally on his.
“Maybe,” he said, telling himself he was only agreeing because he didn’t want her to get riled up.
“I feel lonely, too, sometimes.” And then, just like that, she was crying.
“Hey.” He patted her shoulder clumsily, realized how very naked she was and pulled his hand away. He stared at it as if it was burning.
She seemed to realize how awkward this situation really was. “You need to leave me alone,” she sobbed. “I’m not even dressed.”
What wasn’t happening? He wasn’t leaving her alone. What was happening? He was going to try and make her okay with this.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, pulling his attention away from his hand and ordering himself to buck up. “You’ve had a bit of a shock. People say and do things they wouldn’t normally say or do. I’m a trained professional. I deal with stuff like this all the time.”
Even as she scrubbed furiously at her tearstained face, she looked dubious. She slid a look down at her thin covering of a shower curtain. “Like a doctor?”
“Sort of,” he agreed.
“And you deal with unclothed, crying, lonely women who have been assaulted by exploding showers? All the time?”
“I just meant I deal with the unexpected.” He tried for a soothing note in the face of her voice rising a bit shrilly. “It’s what I’m trained to do. Let’s get you up off the floor.”
He reached for the nearest towel rack and tugged a towel off it, and then, as an afterthought, another one. He put both of them on top of her, trying to fasten them, without much success, around the sopping, slippery, transparent shower curtain.
Tucking the thick white terry towels around her as best he could, he slipped his arm under her shoulder and lifted her to a little dressing table bench. It was the first time he had touched her since he had held her hand at the pool in the river. Awareness quivered along his spine, but he could not give in to that. He needed to be professional right now, as he never had been before.
Connor guided Isabella to sitting and tucked the towels a little tighter around her.
Professional, he told himself grimly.
“Let’s just have a look at that bump on your head.” That was good, he told himself of his neutral tone.
“Why are you lonely?” he heard himself growl as he parted her hair and dabbed at the bump with a wet cloth.
What was professional about that? Distracting her, Connor told himself. He turned from her for a moment and opened the medicine chest over her sink. He found iodine and cotton balls.
“I suppose you find me pathetic,” she said.
Distracting her would have been talking about anything—the upcoming royal wedding, the grape crops—not probing her personal tragedies.
She grimaced as he found the cut on her head and dabbed it.
“I don’t find you pathetic,” he told her. “You were married. Your husband died. It seems to me you would be lonely.”
“Thank you,” she said softly.
Leave it, he ordered himself. “I mean, of course I’ve wondered why such a beautiful woman would stay alone.”
“You wondered about me?”
Just as she had wondered about him, going online to find out about the SEALs. All this curiosity between them was just normal, wasn’t it? They were two strangers sharing a house. Naturally they would have questions.
“Did you love your husband that much?” Connor asked. “That you are prepared to stay lonely forever? To grieve him forever?”
“Yes,” she said. It came out sounding like a hiccup. “Where there is deep grief, there was deep love.”
And something about the way she said that made his radar go up. He realized he didn’t believe her. It was none of his business. He ordered himself not to probe. He was, at heart, a soldier. He would always be a soldier. That’s what he did. He obeyed orders.
So, why did he hear his own voice saying, in direct defiance of the command he had just given it, “Tell me about your husband.”
It was not, as he would have liked himself to believe, to provide a distraction for her while he doctored her head.
“No one, least of all not my very traditional family, understood my decision to marry him,” she said, sticking her chin up as if daring him to reach the same conclusion.
“Why’s that?” he asked, keeping his voice carefully noncommittal.
“He was very ill when