Breaking Her No-Dating Rule Read Online Free PDF Page B

still green if she looked...?
    He was staring at her. It took a couple of nervous heartbeats for her to realize that it wasn’t because he was a mind-reader.
    Oh, yeah, she’d made the
Ahh, your shoulder does hurt
face at him. Because it did. He’d made the pain face, she’d made the
ahh
face, and now he was making the scowl face.
    He didn’t know she was sexually harassing him in her mind.
    While she was trying to decide what she was supposed to be thinking, the man pivoted and walked straight through the archway leading to the rest of the resort.
    Where was he going?
    Crap.
    She should have gone after the medicine by now.
    He was going to disturb Mira, maybe make her leave the love nest and come down here.
    “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Chelsea,” she babbled, and rushed after him in a flurry of flowing skirts and jingling bracelets, but she was too late to see which direction he’d headed. The elevators all sat on the bottom floor, where she was.
    The man was a ninja. A cranky, frosty ninja.
    *
    Ducking into the stairwell, Ellory tilted her head to listen, hoping he wasn’t outside earshot. The plush carpeting that blanketed the hallways and stairs made it hard to tell which way he’d gone. “Anson?” Tentative call unanswered, she stepped back into the hallway.
    Okay, so he didn’t go upstairs by any means, he wasn’t heading for Mira and Jack’s suite.
    Mira’s office? He did want antibiotics for Chelsea. She turned to the right, the shorter hallway, gathered her skirts to her knees so they’d stop the damned swirling, and ran. No yelling. Yelling disturbed people. And every single person in the lodge, except for maybe the two upstairs sheltered from all this information overload in their love nest, were disturbed enough with the current situation.
    One turn and then another, she reached the final hallway just in time to see Anson reach the end and turn toward the wall outside the clinic.
    Before she could call out to him, he reared back and slammed his fist through the drywall.
    The loud slam and cracking sound stunned her into staring for a couple of seconds. Long enough for the pain to reach his brain and make him pull his hand out of the hole while the other gripped his poor shoulder. If it hadn’t hurt before he’d done that...
    “You broke the wall,” she muttered as she trotted forward, no longer running. She was not at all sure how to respond to this masculine and aggressive display. She didn’t know anyone who hit walls when they were upset. Generally, she kept company with people who avoided violence. “I have the keys to Mira’s office, we can get whatever you need for Chelsea. I’ve been keeping an inventory of supplies.”
    He finally turned to look at her and she saw it again—he wasn’t just upset. She saw desolate, blind torture in his hollow eyes. It robbed her of any ability to speak.
    Whatever she’d thought earlier about his motivation behind taking this kind of work, she was now certain: It had nothing to do with being an adrenaline junkie or any kind of fixation on the dream of being the big hero. This mattered to him. This
hurt
him.
    She did the only thing she could, reached out and touched him. Tried to ground him here with her.
    Contact of her palm with his stubble-roughened cheek sharpened his gaze, bringing him back from wherever he’d gone.
    “Don’t worry about the wall. We’ll fix it. Everything will be okay.” She whispered words meant to soothe him.
    It took him a few seconds, but his brows relaxed and he nodded, looking down at the bloody knuckles on his hand and then at the wall. “That was pretty stupid. She’s going to give me hell, isn’t she?” He mustered a smile while simultaneously pulling his head back from her hand.
    He didn’t want her touching him... Okay. It’s not like they really knew one another, and some people just didn’t like to be touched.
    It wasn’t about her. It wasn’t judgment on her.
    Ellory pulled her thoughts away