I took a breath. “So, that was… nice. But I feel like we should set some—”
“Sleep, Duchess.”
“Yes, okay. But first, let’s just agree that—”
Riggs yawned. “Jesus Christ, Duchess. I just gave you the best orgasm of your life. If you don’t pass out in the next five minutes, it’s because you’re trying to stay awake.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then shut it again on a yawn. I mean, he wasn’t wrong, precisely. About the orgasm part, at least. Not that he knew that, the egotistical jerk.
But he made it sound like he’d been doing me a favor! And if he thought I was just going to be able to fall asleep after he said something so rude and insulting, well, he didn’t know shit about physiological reactions to psychological stressors. Furthermore, never in the history of falling asleep had anyone fallen asleep because they were told to fall asleep… except maybe if you were a Marine, which I needed to remind him I… was… not…
I woke up in the morning to bright sunshine in my face. I was lying on my back with my mouth open, which meant I’d been snoring, and I was also horribly sure I’d been drooling.
The good news was Riggs was already up and gone, probably looking for breakfast, so I didn’t have to deal with him and all our awkwardness. The bad news was since Riggs was already awake and gone, it meant he’d seen me in all my postorgasmic hard-sleeping glory.
I groaned. The law of orgasms said the harder you came, the more humiliation you had to suffer the next morning, and apparently there were no exceptions for accidental midnight frots with your domineering bodyguard.
I got up and got ready, pulling on another variation of my cargo-pants-and-polo shirt look, and I grabbed my Horn, promising myself I’d check in with Kev again that morning. I’d been too busy the last few days to keep my promise of staying in touch, but I was pretty sure Saturdays were Kumquat Saturdays, and I didn’t want to let Kev down.
What I was not going to do that morning was obsess over Riggs or what I’d decided to call the Unfortunate Insomnia Frottage Incident. Riggs couldn’t answer a damn question about whether he’d had medical training, so there was no way he’d be capable of a mature discussion about the parameters of our nonrelationship. Therefore, we were just gonna carry on as we had done. Hate-rousal for the win.
“‘Take a bodyguard,’ they said. ‘It’ll be great,’ they said,” I muttered as I went out to the main room of the clinic. Great if you wanted emotional whiplash, maybe.
Riggs opened the door to the clinic as soon as I got out there, and for the first couple of hours of the day, he managed to find things to occupy him in the back room or out in front taking patient information.
Trust him to find a way to hover protectively while still clearly avoiding me.
Later that morning, though, when the crowds thinned out as the village prepared to celebrate the Feast of Santo Roque, Riggs finally stopped reorganizing supplies that clearly hadn’t needed reorganizing and appeared at the door of the makeshift examination room.
I was already seeing my third patient of the morning, but when I heard the distinctive clomp of Riggs’s boots, I glanced up to give him a once-over because I couldn’t not. Out of concern for his health, obviously.
He looked… Ugh. He looked perfect, which was yet another fucking annoying thing about the man. He appeared perfectly cool and comfortable in his khaki pants and boots, despite the drenching humidity, and he didn’t appear even the tiniest bit tired, damn him. If there were any justice in the world, he would have been drooling. Like, epic levels of drool.
“Gonna close up in twenty minutes or so, and we can take the afternoon off,” he said, bracing a hand above his head and not quite meeting my eyes. “Gonna try to check in with my team.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Fine.”
He nodded once, then walked his sexy self away.
My patient, a tiny four-year-old, giggled up at me from her mother’s lap and said something in soft, rapid Spanish.
“She thinks you funny,” her mother said in halting English. She made a circular motion around her own face, then pointed at mine. “You are… angry?”
I grinned down at the little girl, whose recurrent fevers and fatigue suggested malaria, but who managed to be so cheerful despite it.
“Not angry. Just silly.” I stuck out my tongue to make her laugh again. “Silly Dr. Carter, thinking silly thoughts when he should be putting other silly people out of his head.”
I gave the girl’s mother some medicine and a mosquito net and let my translation app tell her when to come back to follow up.