Chapter 14

Soon enough, I was allowed back at the hospital. I went. I worked. I slept, occasionally.

And I kept going back to Jackson’s.

I’d decided not to even try making contact with Tobias Hawthorne’s fixers. If word got out that the Hawthorne heir was alive, the first question that everyone, including my mother, would ask was how. I didn’t trust the billionaire’s people not to land a helicopter right there on the rocks. I wasn’t putting a target on Jackson’s back, so that left the alternative of getting my patient to the point where he could be moved.

Nine times out of ten, I succeeded at thinking of him as Harry. He seemed to take special pleasure in being able to push me to the last tenth. I would have sworn the bane of my existence knew every single time his real name crossed my mind, even though he gave no sign of remembering it himself.

“Hearts or Spades?” Harry didn’t even bother opening his eyes as he issued that question. His voice had fully recovered from the fire and whatever smoke he’d inhaled, and there was something liquid about the way he strung together the words, a silken but somehow pointed laziness that made him irritatingly impossible to ignore.

“Are you asking my preference?” I spread cream across his angry, red bicep. The second-degree burns were looking better. The ones on his chest, in contrast, hadn’t improved. I focused on the work—not on him and certainly not on the feel of muscles beneath my steady, gentle hands. “Spades are more useful.”

“For burying the bodies of your enemies?”

The treatment had to hurt, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell that from the twist of Harry’s lips. You wouldn’t be making jokes like that if you knew who I was and what you took from me, I thought.

Harry had a habit of replying to my silences like they weren’t silences. “Setting aside the questionable uses you have for a literal spade, vicious one, I was asking about the card games. You bought a deck. Makes for better castles than sugar, I suppose.”

He seemed to take a very distinct pleasure in issuing reminders that, when it came to me, he saw everything, noticed everything.

“So, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward…” Harry’s voice was silken despite its rasp. “What’s your poison? Hearts or Spades?”

Poison. That word made me think of the phrase he’d muttered in his sleep. The tree is poison…

“Neither.” I squashed the memory like a bug. “I have better things to do than play with you.” I moved from his bicep to his collarbone—that much closer to his chest.

Harry sucked in a breath around his teeth, but the pain didn’t silence him for long. “If you’re so set on not playing games,” he said, “then why don’t you tell me why I’m still here?”

Here, as in alive? Or here meaning in this shack? I didn’t ask for the clarification. “As punishment for my mortal sins,” I deadpanned.

That surprised a wheeze out of him, almost a laugh. “Why am I here and not in a hospital, mentirosa?”

I recognized the game he was playing. “Spanish for liar?” I guessed.

He neither confirmed nor denied that. “Is it because of me or because of you?” he pressed.

“It’s both,” I said.

“And that”—his eyes finally opened—“was not a lie.” There was power in Toby Hawthorne’s gaze, always.

“You wouldn’t be safe at a hospital.” I parted with a truth and threw the wall back up in my mind, forcing myself to think of him as Harry again.

“You can’t just say something like that and leave me hanging, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward.”

Watch me, I thought, fixing gauze into place. “Done.”

“Until the next time.” His tone was darker now. He smiled, a switchblade smile, the kind I knew better than to trust. “It sure would be a shame if I hurt myself trying to get out of this bed and undid all that work of yours.”

I folded my arms. “You’d pass out from the pain before you got very far.”

“I’m feeling the need,” Harry said, the barest hint of mockery in his tone as he tried another tactic, “for a bedpan.”

“Jackson will be back soon.”

“Maybe I want your assistance.”

“Maybe,” I told him, “you’re bluffing.”

“Bluffing,” Harry repeated, savoring the taste of the word. “Poker, then? One round.”

Something told me that if I turned him down, he’d make me pay for it—or he’d make himself pay for it. “One round,” I agreed, clipping the words.

“Five-Card Draw?” There was the barest hint of a Texas drawl in his voice.

“Fine.” I retrieved the deck and dealt the cards. Beating him was going to be therapeutic. After eyeing my hand, I placed two cards face down on the edge of the mattress. “I’ll take two.”

His eyes were only partially open as I drew two additional cards from the deck, but I knew in my gut that he saw everything. Each and every little tell.

“I’ll hold,” he murmured.

You’re bluffing. I went to lay down my final hand.

He stopped me. “Nuh-uh-uh, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward. What would you like to wager?”

“With you?” I said. “Nothing.”

“How about this? If I win, you give me a sheet of paper.” That proposal took me by surprise. Harry was many things, but restrained and prone to modest requests were not among them.

“What do I get if I win?” I countered.

“Silence.” He had an answer for everything. “Mine, for one full day.”

One day without him saying a word to me sounded pretty damn nice. “Two days,” I countered.

Harry accepted my terms with the slightest incline of his head. “I call.”

I laid down my cards “Two pair. Kings.” I named the higher of my pairs.

“Two pair,” he echoed, laying his own cards beside mine on the mattress. “Jacks.” He smiled a crooked little smile. “Looks like you won.”

That felt a lot more ominous than it should have.