Moira Rogers: Cipher

Which brought him to another problem—what the hell to do with Kat while he paid and retrieved a key.

He thought about leaving her in the SUV. She could climb in the back and hide until he returned, but his instincts balked. She’d be alone and bleeding, and he couldn’t leave her like that.

He actually literally couldn’t .

Andrew parked and stripped off his jacket. “Sit up, sweetheart. Can you slip your arms into this without it hurting too much?”

She held up her injured arm and leaned toward him without unbuckling her seatbelt. The canvas snapped tight across her chest, and she frowned, glanced down and wrinkled her nose. “Seatbelt.”

Christ, she was completely out of it. Panic threatened again, and he swallowed it with fierce determination as he unbuckled her safety belt. “We’re going to put this on you, go inside and check in.

Everything’s fine, you just had a little too much to drink.”

“Got it. I’m a lush.” This time she lifted her arm more slowly, and the pain of easing it into his jacket showed on her face. By the time she’d gotten her other arm into the sleeve her eyes were too bright, and she had to blink away tears. “I’m a wuss. I’m sorry I’m such a wuss.”

“Quit it. You’re doing fine.”

She nodded and lifted her good hand. Her fingertips barely cleared the end of the sleeve, and the sight seemed to amuse her. “Sometimes I forget how huge you are.”

“Uh-huh. I’m a real mountain of a man, sweetheart.” He zipped the jacket and buckled the top for good measure. “Ready?”

A nod. A smile, sweet and unguarded in a way he hadn’t seen from her in a year or more. “I like it when you call me sweetheart.”

The smile hurt , more than he’d believed anything could. “Pull this off, and I’ll call you anything you want.” He hurried around to her door and opened it.

Kat was wobbly at first, but once she had both boots on the ground and one hand around his arm, she steadied. Enough to make it inside, and if she pressed a little close to his side, it looked more like affection than necessity.

They could pull this off.

When the bell above the door chimed, the clerk inside barely glanced up from the small television behind the desk. “Fill out a registration card. Room’s forty-three fifty a night.”

Kat kept her feet while he filled out the card and handed over the cash. Under the harsh lights she looked pale and worn, but her expression stayed blandly pleasant until he got her back out into the parking lot. “I’m starting to feel woozy.”

“I’ve got to get the first aid kit from the truck, and then we’re right here. Room number five.”

“Can we get my bag too? My computer?”

“Yeah, sure.” He propped her against the side of the SUV and grabbed the three bags, including the duffel he’d brought along, in one hand. “Just a little farther.”

“I can do it.” And she did, though it seemed like stubbornness might be the only thing that kept her moving. As soon as he got the door open, she crossed to the sagging bed and slumped on the mattress.

“Wow. It’s not even noon and I think I need a nap.”

“You need food first.” He locked the door and grabbed the takeout menu hanging on the back of the knob. “Can you look at this while I check out your arm?”

“After.” She tugged at the zipper, working it down in uneven jerks that made her wince. “I think you’re gonna have to help me get this off. And the T-shirt, too, if it needs to go.”

He pulled off the jacket and wished again that he had something to give her for the pain. The makeshift bandage around her upper arm was soaked through with blood, and the sight and the smell combined made him want to rage . “Good thing Carmen gave me a crash course in creative first aid.”

Her eyebrows came together. “I didn’t know you were taking lessons from her too.”

He couldn’t tell Kat the truth—that he’d done it for himself, but he’d been thinking of her. Shapeshifters healed quickly, but the most important person in his world wasn’t a shifter at all. “Pays to know how to patch people up.”

“Guess so.” She closed her eyes, and some of her earlier giddiness seemed to have vanished under tense lines of pain. “So how bad is it?”

“Could be way worse.” He probed at her arm. The angry furrow angling up the outside of her biceps was bleeding but sluggishly, and it looked shallow. “I don’t think it hit anything important. Doesn’t look like anything I can sew up, though. Maybe just some butterfly bandages.”

“Oh, good. That suturing shit looks hot in the movies, but I think I’d probably puke on your boots. I’m not exactly Lara Croft.”

He had to find some way to put her at ease, or she might puke on him anyway. “Your pop culture references are getting dated. What the hell have you been doing with yourself?”

“Getting a PhD and becoming a psychic ninja.” She trembled under his touch. One hand rested in her lap and the other fisted around the covers so tightly her knuckles were white. But she kept talking, kept trying , even when her voice shook as hard as her body. “Oh, and letting Zola and Walker kick me around their dojo five days a week. My PlayStation has cobwebs.”

“Okay, so you’ve been busy.” He dug a bottle of antiseptic and some gauze pads out of the first aid kit.

“Mmm.” She listed to the side, and he gently righted her. “Had to. Busy’s better than brooding.”

“So I’ve been told.”

Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Busy’s better than missing you.”

No amount of activity had kept him from missing her. “I know what you mean.”

Kat laughed, though it broke off when he dabbed the antiseptic on her wound. “We both kept so busy to keep from missing each other, and now the people we were missing are gone.”

“I haven’t changed that much,” he lied.

“Don’t need empathy when the lie’s that stupid.”

It hurt to acknowledge the truth, so he’d forced himself to do it a long time ago. It hadn’t occurred to him that she would do the same. “All right, those people are gone. No laid-back architects or happy-go-lucky programmers here.”

“No.” The pain in her voice cut deep. “But you found a new place. You’re on the Southeast council and you’re changing the world and I’m—I’m practically unemployed and stuck on shit that happened before I was born.”

And if the stuff about her mother hadn’t been kept from her, maybe she would have already dealt with it. “You had more to work through than me.”

“Yeah. And it got me shot. It could have gotten you shot.” She flinched as he fixed the first bandage in place. “And all because I don’t want to be Alec’s pet hacker for the rest of my life.”

“Who would want to be? The man’s a terror to work with.”

“He wants me to be nineteen still. But I’m not nineteen.”

“If you were, he’d still have a reason to protect you.”

She choked on a hysterical laugh. “Guess I just proved I need it. Way to go, Kat.”

“Quit it,” he ordered. “You can’t blame yourself for a fucking sniper.”

“It’s not about blame. It’s about—” She hissed in a sudden breath, her hand opening and closing helplessly on the thin coverlet. “Okay, I really am going to puke on you. Are you almost done?”

He placed the last strip and sat back. “Yeah. It wouldn’t heal pretty, but it’ll hold you together until we can do better.”

She said nothing for a long time, her gaze fixed ahead and her jaw tight with pain. Then she unclenched her hand and lifted it to swipe at a stray tear. “That’s all I really need.”

Don’t do it— Andrew slipped his arm around her and bent to put his mouth close to her ear. “You’re all right. You think you’re not, but you are.”