His whole face goes crimson.
“Project,” he says.
“A project.”
“Repairs.” He rakes a hand through his hair, which does nothing except redistribute the evidence. “Enrichment. Thing. For the—it's not important.”
“Uh-huh.”
He turns toward the tents so fast that I have to lengthen my stride to keep up, and I file the blush away next to everything else I don't understand about today. It doesn't read like a man hiding vandalism. It reads like a man hiding a birthday present. Which makes no sense.
Peanut is thrilled to see me, which is to say he chirps once and holds out a grape in what I choose to interpret as a gift and is probably a bribe.
“Look at that grip.” I take the grape so he doesn't feel rejected. His small fingers close and release around my thumb, strong and even, no guarding, no favoring. The swelling is nearly gone. The bruise has faded to a yellow-green smudge.
He does not, medically speaking, need me anymore.
A responsible vet would say so. A responsible vet would sayone more visit to close the chart and we're done here, and save the practice the drive time, and give Dr. Vance one less thing to detonate about.
“Same time tomorrow,” I say instead, capping the syringe. “And I'd like to recheck the range of motion Thursday.”
Rowe nods like this is reasonable, and I busy myself with the sharps container so he can’t see my face.
While I repack the kit, I watch him the way I promised myself I would. He's holding Peanut against his chest, murmuring something too low to catch, and the capuchin has melted into him, boneless and trusting, and I really try to see if I can draw some parallels with what happened to Sam Harlan.
“Wren.”
I glance up. He's set Peanut back in the fleece-lined basket and he's standing by the tent flap, shifting his weight again, and his jaw is doing something complicated.
“Do you want—” He stops. Starts over. “There's beer. In my trailer. If you—I mean, if you don't have to be back.”
The words come out in the wrong order and all at once, like he rehearsed them and the rehearsal made it worse.
And my entire body answers before my brain has finished translating.
Because I know whatbeer in my trailermeans now. It means the bench and the lamp and four feet of charged air. It means his voice dropping low with arousal. It means the single hottest experience of my twenty-nine years, and my pussy remembers it faster than my head does—heat rolling through me so hard and sudden I have to press my knees together right there in the monkey tent.
I should go back to work. I have afternoon appointments. I have a boss doing his impression of an unexploded shell behind an office door. I have a list of perfectly good reasons typed neatly in my head.
“Yes,” I say instead.
The list bursts into flame. I don't mourn it.
His trailer is exactly as I left it last night—tidy, small, the bench, the chair, the lamp—except for one thing, and I see it the second the door clicks shut behind us.
A board leans against the far wall. Big. Heavy poplar,four feet wide and taller than me, its upper third scarred with pale knife strikes.
And in the center, at a very specific, very deliberate height: a hole. Round. Its rim sanded so smooth it gleams.
The sawdust in his hair.
Oh.
The heat that goes through me is instant and total, scalp to soles, a flush so violent I feel it behind my ears. I hear my own words from last night, blurted out on that bench with my hand between my thighs—I could kneel on the other side and you could just?—
I said it half out of my mind, and I've replayed it forty times since with my face in my pillow, certain I'd shocked him.
He built it.