the floor tile, the fixtures, even the towels and the liquid soap in the dispenser on the pedestal sink.
Beside the bathroom was a spare bedroom that she’d set up as a home office. Two walls were covered in bookshelves made of pale wood and neatly filled with yet more medical texts and journals. Her desk, also in pale wood, was just as ruthlessly organized—with pens, pencils and highlighters neatly lined up in distinctly separate containers.
The Twilight Zone theme started to play quietly in his head. There were no real personal touches anywhere. No indication of her interests or hobbies or insights into her personality, and if he didn’t know better, he’d think her career was the sum total of who she was.
But he did know better. He’d kissed her and touched her, and she’d responded with a passion that had taken his breath away. She’d wrapped herself around him as he’d thrust into her body, shuddering and sighing and completely coming undone. Yeah, there was a lot more to Avery than the impersonal and sterile environment of her home indicated.
A spot of green caught the corner of his eye, and he smiled when he noted the stubby plant on the windowsill, recognizing it as some kind of cactus. Even her plant carried the same hands-off vibe that she did. Except that beneath her prickly exterior, she was warm and soft and shockingly uninhibited.
The challenge, of course, was getting past that exterior, and Justin suspected that scaling her walls once would only make a subsequent breach that much more difficult. He also realized he didn’t want to breach her defenses—he wanted to tear them down completely.
He turned away from the cactus in the window to return to the kitchen. That was when he saw it. Another bookcase tucked into an alcove beside the door. He moved in for a closer inspection. The books here were mostly classical literature and popular fiction, with some surprisingly racy titles in the mix, all of them arranged alphabetically by author.
On top of the bookshelf was a framed photograph—the only one he’d seen in the whole apartment—of a little boy and a little girl. The picture had been snapped from behind as the two children walked, hand in hand, away from whoever was in possession of the camera and toward the iconic castle at Disney World. He instinctively knew the children were Avery and her brother, Ryder, even before he looked closely enough to see their names embroidered on the matching Mickey Mouse ears they wore.
It was a snapshot of her childhood, a brief glimpse of a happy moment somehow made more poignant by the realization that she couldn’t have been more than eight years old in the photo and there were no other, later pictures to be found anywhere else in her apartment—or at least in any of the rooms he’d visited so far.
“What are you doing in here?” Avery demanded.
He glanced over, his heart doing a slow roll inside his chest when he saw her standing in the doorway, looking so naturally beautiful and sexy. Her face was scrubbed free of makeup, her hair had been released from its habitual ponytail and skimmed her shoulders. She’d dressed in a pair of black yoga pants and a long, fuzzy V-neck sweater in a pretty shade of blue that almost exactly matched her eyes. Her feet were bare, her toenails painted a bold crimson color that seemed out of character for her but which he knew was not.
“I was looking for you,” he finally answered her question.
She arched a brow. “You didn’t trust I’d find my way back to the kitchen?”
“No, I meant I was looking for a glimpse of you somewhere—anywhere—in this sterile apartment.”
She didn’t blink at his criticism. Nor had he expected her to. It wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to ruffle her feathers if they ruffled easily.
“Remind me not to give you the name of my decorator,” she responded lightly.
“I didn’t think the white was your choice.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked, in a deliberate change of topic.
“I think I did.” He held up the photo.
She took the frame from his hand and carefully set it back into place on the bookshelf. “Dinner will be ready in—” she glanced at the watch on her wrist “—six and a half minutes.”
He smiled. “Precisely six and a half? Not six or seven but six and a half?”
“The pasta takes twelve minutes to cook and I dropped it into the pot approximately five and a half minutes ago.”
“What would happen if you forgot to put the timer on and cooked it for—” he gasped dramatically “—thirteen minutes?”
“Then we’d have to eat overcooked spaghetti,” she said matter-of-factly, but she frowned at the prospect.
He shook his head. “Where did you go to medical school?”
She seemed startled by the abrupt change of topic but, after a brief hesitation, she responded, “Harvard.”
“Figures.”
“I actually wanted to go to Stanford, but my parents thought Harvard was more prestigious.”
“I bet you graduated summa cum laude, too, didn’t you?”
“So? I worked hard and studied hard.”
“I’m sure you did,” he agreed. “And I have no doubt you’re a better doctor because of it. But sometimes, instead of blasting a tunnel through a mountain, you should climb to the top and enjoy the view.”
“If you have a point, I’m not seeing it,” she told him.
“My point is that you’re obviously dedicated, focused and driven, and those are great attributes in the practice of medicine. But when they carry over into your personal life, it suggests that something happened that compels you to rigidly and ruthlessly control every aspect of your life.”
“You’re reading an awful lot into the fact that I use a kitchen timer when I cook my pasta.”
“It’s not just the pasta,” he told her. “You have your highlighters aligned in the spectrum of the rainbow.”
“I didn’t realize being organized was a character flaw.”
“I’m the same way when it comes to every examination and procedure I perform in the ER,” he admitted. “But when I walk out of the hospital at the end of my shift, I let that go and relax.”
“Good for you.”
“You should let go a little, too,” he suggested. “You’re wound up like a torsion spring and one of these days, all of the energy trapped inside of you is going to let loose. Or maybe that is what happened in the supply closet.”
“That’s a better explanation than anything I could come up with,” she acknowledged. “And maybe, after more than two years, it was time to let loose a little.”
His brows lifted. “Are you telling me that it was more than two years since you’d had sex?”
“I’m sure it’s not some kind of celibacy record.”
“Sorry, it’s just that—wow. Two years.” He shook his head. “I can’t imagine.”
She rolled her eyes. “We both know you can’t imagine—that’s why I wanted the test.”
“Right. The test.”
For a few minutes, Justin had forgotten the reason he was here—the only reason Avery was making dinner for him.
As if on cue, a buzzer sounded from the kitchen.
“That’s the pasta,” she said, automatically turning away.
He caught her hand, halting her before she reached the door. She glanced over her shoulder, a quizzical expression on her face.