His Borrowed Wife

Chapter 2 — House Rules

Kia

I didn't sleep.

I lay in the bed that Evan paid for, in the room Evan chose, in the house that had never once felt like mine and I stared at the ceiling and thought about what I had done. A man was bleeding in the east wing. A stranger. An enemy, probably. And I had cleaned his wound and wrapped his ribs and tucked him in like he was something I was responsible for now.

I went to medical school for eight years. I did my residency in emergency medicine. I have seen things on a table that would make most people's knees give out and I did not flinch because that was the job and I was good at it. Evan had asked me to stop working two years ago, gently at first and then in the way he had of asking things that left me with no choice, and so I stopped. But the training doesn't leave you. Your hands still know what to do.

That was what I told myself at three in the morning while I stared at the ceiling. That it was just the training. That any doctor would have done it.

I was downstairs by seven.

I made a plate of food, nothing elaborate, scrambled eggs and toast and a glass of water and I put it on a tray with the small pharmacy bag I had quietly assembled the night before. Antibiotics from the medicine cabinet in Evan's bathroom that I knew he kept stocked and never checked. Gauze, medical tape, antiseptic, two bottles of water.

I carried the tray to the east wing and knocked twice before I opened the door.

He was awake. He had pulled himself up against the headboard and his complexion was better than it had been, still rough but no longer the particular shade of pale that meant someone was running out of time. He looked at the tray and then at me.

"You cooked," he said.

"Don't read into it," I said, setting the tray down on the nightstand.

He almost smiled. Almost.

I pulled the chair from the corner closer to the bed and sat down and looked at him directly. I had decided in the night that I was going to be clear. That this was not going to be a situation that got complicated because I failed to set boundaries at the beginning.

"I need you to understand how this works," I said. "You stay in this room. You don't go near the windows that face the main driveway, you don't use the phone on the nightstand, and you don't make noise. The cleaning staff comes Thursday and you will need to be completely silent from seven in the morning until noon. Evan comes back in two days. You will be gone before that."

He watched me while I talked.

"Okay," he said.

Just that. Just okay.

"I mean it," I said, because the easiness of it made me suspicious.

"I heard you," he said, reaching for the glass of water.

"You agreed too quickly," I said.

He looked at me over the rim of the glass with something that might have been amusement. "What would you prefer? You want me to argue about it?"

"I want you to take it seriously."

"I am taking it seriously," he said, setting the glass down. "I'm just not going to perform taking it seriously for you. I don't have a lot of energy to spare right now."

I looked at him for a moment and then let it go.

"I need to check the wound," I said, standing and reaching for the gauze.

He shifted forward without being asked and lifted the edge of his shirt and I leaned in to unwrap the bandaging I had done the night before. In the daylight and with a clearer head I could assess things properly. The entry and exit were clean. No major vessel involvement or he would not have made it through the night. Mild to moderate tissue damage, risk of infection was the main concern now.

"You did good work last night," he said, looking down at what I was doing.

"I'm a doctor," I said.

He went quiet for a second. "You're Evan Belluti's girlfriend and you're a doctor."

"I was a doctor," I said, and something about saying it out loud in that flat way made my chest feel tight. "He's a doctor's boyfriend now."

Nigel didn't say anything to that but I felt him register it in the way his posture changed slightly. I focused on cleaning the wound. The inflammation was manageable. I applied antiseptic and he didn't make a sound and I had already noticed by now that pain didn't seem to move across his face the way it did for most people.

I was taping the fresh gauze down on his left side when I saw it.

Just below the new bandaging, starting at his hip and curving upward, was a tattoo, one of hundreds but this was was distinct. Black ink, older, the lines settled into his skin the way tattoos do when they have been there a long time. It was a crest of some kind.

I had seen it before.

My hands kept moving even when my mind was doing something else. I finished taping the gauze and sat back and kept my face completely still.

Evan had a file. He kept it in the lower drawer of his office desk which was locked but which I had opened once by accident with a key from the household ring that I had since been told was not for that lock. I had not looked at it for long. Long enough.

There had been photographs. Surveillance style, grainy, taken from a distance. A man coming out of a building. A man getting into a car. The same crest visible on his arm in one of the clearer shots.

There had been a name written on the inside of the folder in Evan's handwriting.

Guivannio.

I looked at the man sitting in the bed in front of me and I felt something cold settle in the center of my chest.

"What's your last name?" I asked, and my voice came out even.

He looked at me. Something shifted behind his eyes. Not guilt exactly. More like he was making a decision about how to answer.

"You already know," he said quietly.

"I want to hear you say it," I said.

He held my gaze for a long moment.

"Guivannio," he said.

The room felt smaller immediately.

Evan had been looking for this man for over a year. I had heard the name in passing, in conversations I was not supposed to be paying attention to, in phone calls that Evan did not know I could hear from the hallway. He was not just a rival. He was the rival. The one Evan talked about in a specific tight-lipped way that meant the situation was personal.

I stood up and put the supplies back in the bag with careful, deliberate movements.

"Why did you come here?" I asked. "Of all the places you could have gone. Why here?”

"Because it was the last place anyone would think to look for me," he said. "And because I was about to bleed out on the street and your service gate was the closest thing."

I looked at him.

"Does that change things?" he asked.

I thought about Evan's car pulling out of the gate last night. I thought about the file in the locked drawer.

"Eat your eggs," I said, and walked out.

I stood in the hallway and pressed my back against the wall and closed my eyes and understood with complete clarity that I had not just hidden an enemy in this house.

I had hidden the enemy.

The one Evan would burn everything down to find.

And I had just put fresh bandages on his wounds and made him scrambled eggs.