Alone With You (Cabin Fever Series Book 1)

about the shed.”
He crossed his arms.
“Anyone can see there’s a terrible secret eating away at your heart.” She shook her head. “No matter how many birds you carve, the trouble isn’t going to fly away.”
Pressure built behind his sternum. Why hadn’t he been more careful? He should have packed away everything when he wasn’t here, taped the boxes closed. Now Jenny’s words threaten to pry everything open, every terrible moment—and with a new gust of wind and splatter of rain, suddenly he was inside the tent in the Amazon again, working between cots where sixty-odd people lay groaning. Mud gave beneath his feet, soaked by rain and blood. He and three other doctors worked to save the people hurt in an attack that wouldn’t make any international newspaper except as a short blurb next to an advertisement for Gucci. He remembered stepping out of the tent into the rain to plunder the overturned supply boxes for gauze, bandages, clean strips of cotton—thinking that he’d been awake for twenty-six hours—when the young woman had emerged from the murky darkness. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. Her eyes swam in tears, as the rain battered a limp child in her arms.
“What happened, Logan?”
What happened? What else could happen. He’d seized the child, another victim, he’d assumed. He’d carried the six- or seven-year-old into the tent while the mother trailed behind him, speaking in the local tribal language Logan had just begun to learn. No signs of obvious bleeding, no traumatic wound, no broken bones, no head trauma. He saw the runny nose, noted the lethargy, felt a fever. He shouted for a nurse, gave her standard instructions, doses of medicine and intervals, and then strode back out of the tent to fetch whatever he’d been looking for—a tourniquet, bandages, sutures—he could hardly remember now. He’d conformed to triage protocol. He would check on the child later.
He glanced up at Jenny’s stricken face, the memory washing through him, gripped by a self-loathing shudder as he dug his fingernails into his arms.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
The man was traumatized.
Jenny watched the war inside Logan manifest in the cold light of the shed’s single bulb. His jaw was set, his hands digging deep into his balled biceps, but his eyes looked like bruises. He swallowed spasmodically. She wanted to launch herself off this stool, cross the room, wrap her arms around him, but she held herself firm on the seat. She wasn’t sure that kind of comfort might not be welcome, for he gave off waves of warning.
She dug her fingers into the ripped, padded seat of the swivel stool, feeling out of her depth. She worked with scientists and academicians all day, focused her attention on experiments she could control down to the last variable parameter. A wizard with test tubes, she always felt at sea with new acquaintances, with fresh friendships, and always with lovers, few as she’d had. Socializing and intimacy involved so many unpredictable, uncontrollable factors. Strong feelings unsettled her, she’d come from a family that considered hard work and stoicism a virtue. Now standing here before Logan, she sensed that one wrong move, or one wrong word, and this complicated and intriguing man might turn on one foot and walk into the darkness and probably out of her life, and she would never understand why.
A creeping dread made her stomach roll, but she set her mind on suppressing the prickling unease at the thought of abandonment—that was an old reflex, one she had learned to disarm. Logan was the one in distress right now. She would focus on how to draw him out—or whether to draw him. She could only fathom a guess as to what he’d experienced to put him in such a state, to require the time and energy and distraction of this kind of work. She knew a little about the organization, having interviewed a few doctors who’d worked in remote areas about the local botanical medicine. She knew these doctors were often sent into areas of battle and conflict. Should she change the subject, divert him from his agony by choosing to keep their bond shallow? Should she ask him again what happened? She cycled through the choices, knowing that whatever she did, it risked destroying the easy connection they’d enjoyed these past days by pushing him away…or drawing him even dangerously closer.
“I think I told you,” she ventured into the thick silence, “that my father was a surgeon.”
He usually came home humming Mozart or Vivaldi, his terrible voice cracking, but the enthusiasm clear. When she was home for holidays, she’d greet him at the door and hum along. But sometimes, he came home silent. She would meet him at the door and see a different face, a different man.
“I always knew when he lost someone on the operating table.” She slid off the stool, the boards hard beneath her feet. “His expression looked a lot like yours right now, Logan.”
She took a step toward him, sliding her hand along the edge of the work table, trying to act casual as she approached, watching his face as she did so. He planted his hands on his hips and turned away, to stare through the doorway into the darkness of the night.
“My mother,” she added, “never seemed to let tragedy bother her, or, at least, I didn’t see it. She would tell me what had happened that day, then pause a moment or two if the news was bad. Then she would take a deep breath and ask me what happened in school.” Her mother coped differently, that’s how Jenny saw it, but now she wondered if that was her mother’s way of hiding from the pain. “It sounds odd, and I guess it was. I understood my father’s silence better—”
“Stop Jenny,” he interrupted, speaking into the night. “Please. You didn’t sign up for this.”
“I’m just talking, Logan.”
“Talking can bring complications.”
“I can handle complications.”
He laughed, acidly. “Well, this ex-doctor can’t.”
He paced in the doorway, a