For the longest breath the world around Ashna disappeared. Then it slammed back into her chest and all the oxygen left the room.
A vise clamped around Ashna’s lungs. Cold sweat broke across her forehead. She raised her elbow to wipe it. The knife’s blade gleamed at the edge of her vision, and the heavy wooden handle started to slide from her hand. She tightened her grip.
Breathe.
The man, at once broad and limber, strolled toward her, his stride lazy. As lazy and graceful as it had ever been. Reflective sunglasses covered his eyes, completely obscuring them. Dark hair was pulled back from his face in a bun. Thick, perfectly trimmed stubble highlighted the sharp lines of his jaw. How she even recognized him she had no idea. He looked entirely different, yet so familiar that the vise tightened around her lungs.
Her elbow was still pressed into her forehead. Frozen there.
He stuck out his hand, that too-wide, too-finely-etched mouth pressed tightly together, his tell that things weren’t as boring as his body language suggested.
The knife slipped from Ashna’s grip.
Screams erupted around them. The blade flashed in the lights as it fell, pointed tip down, toward Ashna’s sandal-clad feet.
A ball spun across the air, slicing through years in an instant. A hand reached out to catch it. The hand closed around the handle, missing the blade by a breath just as the tip scratched the leather of her sandal. Without touching her skin.
He was on his knees at her feet, knife held in one hand like a ninja. His sunglasses had gone flying as he leaped. Breath panted from his mouth—the only sound Ashna could hear—as golden eyes met hers, the green flecks on fire. They were still edged in thick spiky lashes, still one slightly smaller than the other, still stunning enough to steal her breath.
“You okay?” The voice floated up across the years. A thunderclap of emotions spun those years into a tornado around them. Ashna fell to her knees in front of him, almost grabbed his face the way she had done the first time she kissed him.
Pain flooded his eyes, yanking her back to her kitchen, to the clang of the knife on the floor next to them. To the pandemonium of voices asking—demanding—to know how he was . . . how she was . . . what the hell had just happened? But the pain in his eyes—
“You’re in pain,” she said, springing to her feet and grabbing his arm. “Someone help him up. He’s hurt himself.” His eyes squeezed shut as Jonah grabbed his other arm, and together they helped him up, but he couldn’t straighten his leg. Obviously couldn’t put weight on it.
“Someone call 911,” she shouted, then remembered that Trisha was a doctor. “Trisha! Where’s Trisha? Someone get Trisha—”
“Relax,” he said, steadying her with those kaleidoscope eyes. “Breathe.”
“I’m here.” Trisha squatted down in front of him and reached for his leg. “I’m a doctor. Hi. Dr. Trisha Raje. May I?”
He nodded at Trisha, then threw a quick look at Ashna again, which didn’t help her breathe at all. “I’m fine. I just landed on my stitches.”
Ashna’s heart spasmed.
From across the kitchen Nisha mouthed, What the hell was that?
“I’m going to have to cut that. The pant, not the leg.” How could Trisha joke right now? But he smiled.
Ashna handed her a pair of shears. Trisha cut the fabric, exposing one massively muscled calf. He’d always had the most beautiful legs. The most beautiful body. The most beautiful—
His knee was swelling so fast it looked like it might burst. A fleshy pink scar edged in angry red staple marks stretched at its seams. In his eyes was pure agony.
Trisha pushed the denim out of the way and examined the knee. “We need to get you to the ER. There’s internal bleeding. They’ll have to drain it,” she said as though talking about scooping seeds out of bitter melon. “That was spectacular, by the way. I think you saved Ashna’s toes.”
“Pleasure?” he said in that way he’d always had of turning everything into a question.
I love you?
Who made words like that sound like a question?
“I am so sorry,” she said, her voice shaking despite her best effort, everything inside her shaking.
“No apology necessary,” he said. Then his voice tipped suddenly low and cold. “Not for this.”
Just like that he was a stranger again, a stranger who had just slid across her kitchen floor on his hurt knee.
The way his gaze touched hers was the opposite of his voice. In his eyes was every bit of the knowing they had shared.
Ashna stepped away from him. Suddenly she was shaking for a whole different reason. He was wrong; this was the only thing he deserved an apology for. Every other apology was his to give. Not that all the apologies in the world would change anything.
“The ambulance is here,” Jonah shouted across the kitchen.
Paramedics wheeled a gurney into the kitchen and helped him onto it. They threw out a string of questions about what had happened, his pain level, the kind of surgery. He answered patiently, his lips barely moving because his jaw was clenched in pain.
Trisha supplied medical-sounding words that turned distorted at the edges in Ashna’s ears. The room floated as though she were underwater watching it undulate.
“It’s a good thing we’re barely a mile from Stanford Hospital. They should have you fixed and good to go before it gets worse,” Trisha said.
At this point his knee resembled a small melon, a very angry melon with a scar that looked ready to rip open. But the initial blast of agony was gone from his eyes. It had to have taken an insane effort, but he had himself well under control.
Ashna’s hand tightened on the stainless-steel countertop. She wanted to step closer to the gurney and ease the pain he thought he was hiding. The thought made her livid at herself.
His eyes searched for something. Her gaze followed his to the floor and found his sunglasses wedged under a cabinet. Picking up the aviators, she handed them to him, careful not to let their fingers touch, even as he avoided touching hers.
In one quick motion he covered his eyes, and the mix of steady green and volatile gold disappeared behind the reflective blue.
When they started to roll him away, Ashna tried to follow, but the front of her sandal slid off her foot and hung from it like a dog’s tongue. The strap had been sliced almost right through, and the last bit of leather holding it together came apart. If his reflexes hadn’t been what they were, she might have had a few toes missing right now.
Then again, if his reflexes hadn’t been what they were, her life would not have taken the turn it had all those years ago.
Ashna watched them wheel the gurney out. The rest of the crew, and her cousins, followed. Only Jonah stayed back, fluttering around the kitchen looking strangely excited. Then he followed too.
He was almost out the door when he stopped, slapped a hand to his forehead, and turned to Ashna. “Shit, he never got a chance to introduce himself. That was Frederico Silva, the legendary striker for Manchester United.”
Car engines fired in the parking lot. A single siren blast rang through the air, then dropped into silence. Jonah ran out the door.
Ashna sank to the floor, shrinking back into the cabinets and under the countertops. “I know,” she whispered into her suddenly empty kitchen. “I know exactly who he is.”