“My eyes are up here, Captain.”
My gaze jerked up to Wyatt’s smirking face. He held a towel around his neck, like I’d interrupted him right before he climbed into the shower. My well-trained eyes betrayed me and slipped back down his torso, my brain not quite ready to find words to answer him back. A spot of red on the left side of his ribs caught my attention.
“You’re bleeding,” I stated, stepping into his house and crowding him backward. He gave the door a shove, and it closed behind me.
His smell was all around me, that scent of soap and man that I was coming to crave every morning as I got to work. I reached a hand out to his torso, his skin flinching when I touched him.
“May I…?” I didn’t even know what I was asking permission for, but he nodded just the same.
I took the towel from around his neck and dabbed at the blood, seeing that the cut was more of a ragged scrape with some bruising below it.
“Sit.” I pointed at a barstool next to a kitchen counter just behind us.
Wyatt huffed out a sigh, but sat down anyway. “It’s just a scratch.”
I shook my head and kept dabbing. “Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”
His breath puffed against my hair and the side of my cheek. “Because it’s not a big deal. I get bumps and scratches all the time.”
Stupid men. Bumps and scratches were one thing, but an open wound was another. Infections could get serious in our line of work when we were rolling around in the dirt with suspects who had questionable hygiene standards. “Where’s your first aid kit?”
He made a noise, and I looked over at him, startled to see his face a mere three inches away from mine. His dark blue eyes were almost black around the outer ring, but lighter blue toward the center.
“I don’t have one,” he said softly. Intimately.
The unease in my belly took flight, a totally different kind of unease setting my blood on fire. “Hydrogen peroxide at least?”
He tossed his head backward. “Below my bathroom sink.”
I swallowed hard. “Stay here.”
I moved through his house, knowing the layout from when I’d visited Jim before he passed away. Wyatt had changed some things with fresh paint, but that was about it. His bathroom was tidy except for the uniform shirt and undershirt on the floor. I grabbed some tissues, the peroxide, and some bandages I found below the sink before heading back to the kitchen.
Wyatt was exactly where I’d left him. He ran a hand over his beard scruff. “I’m sure it’s fine, you know.”
I shrugged and put the supplies on the counter. “I’ll feel better when it’s been disinfected.”
I balled the tissues up below his cut and dumped a stream of peroxide on the wound. Wyatt hissed, but didn’t flinch away. I waited until the bubbling went away and then dabbed at the cut again, just now remembering why I was over here.
“I’m concerned, Wyatt.”
“I told you it’s a minor cut.”
“No.” I cut him off. “Not about this. About the fact that you won’t tell me who you are or where you come from. I can’t be partners with someone who keeps secrets. I play by the rules. Being a good cop, keeping my nose clean, is everything to me. Law enforcement is in my blood and I won’t have you fucking that up for me because you won’t share a few details.”
Wyatt stilled my hand as I put a bandage over the cut. “It’s not important where I come from. What’s important is who I am now.”
I shook my head and snatched my hand back. “No. You may think that, but what if another situation comes up with someone from your past and you freak out about it or look the other way to protect them or leave our asses exposed while you play catch-up? I can’t have that happening.”
“Would it help you to know that Sheriff Locke knows my history and trusts that I’ve got your six? If he didn’t trust me, he would have made me a house mouse, stuck me on a desk until I aged out. Am I right?” Wyatt leaned forward, our noses almost touching, his gaze burning into mine. Daring me to disagree with him.
And fucking hell if he wasn’t right. I trusted Sheriff Locke’s judgement implicitly, and Wyatt knew that. I backed up a step.
“Fine. But let it be known that I still think you need to be honest with me for us to work well together.” I met his gaze again and implored him, showing vulnerability for just a moment. “Don’t fuck this up for me, Wyatt.”
He stood, crowding me, looking down with a gaze that held something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. “That’s the first thing that attracted me to you. As your partner,” he clarified. “Your honesty and integrity.”
My heart fluttered a mile a minute, a fact I was sure he could hear in the quiet of his house. If a teasing Wyatt was hard to deal with, intense shirtless Wyatt was even harder to resist.
“Sure it wasn’t the getting off to porn?” I sputtered out as a joke. A really stupid one, as it turned out. Bringing up that moment when Wyatt saw me completely naked in my most vulnerable state was not something to bring up when we were alone again. Everyone in my family knew my lack of ability to tell jokes. This was a prime example.
Wyatt came impossibly closer and my head tipped back further. His eyes looked positively on fire as his gaze flickered down to my mouth.
