Page 15 of Sean's Sunshine

If Billy ever ended up face-to-face with Sean Kryzynski’s pretty blue eyes again, bad things might happen. There might be… closeness. There might even betalking. More talking. When they were close. Which could lead to highly inappropriate things between a nurse and his patient, right?

Billy sort of wanted to talk to Cotton about that. From what Billy had seen before he’d bailed on the flophouse, Cotton’s sick guy had been scrawny and wounded and half out of his mind. Cotton wasn’t, like,attractedto that, was he? Because no. Just no.

ButBilly’ssick guy was alert. He was awake. He kept fighting to get out of bed by himself and be independent and challenge Billy’s authority in this whole nursing gig, and Billy was finding himself… well, interested.

Definitely interested.

Because it was hard not to be interested in a guy who pretty much got all your hackles up fourteen hours of every day, and Billy suspected it might be more once Kryzynski—Sean—got better and was not made of sleep.

But it was stupid to be interested in a guy who lived a whole different life than you, right?

But that didn’t mean Billy wanted him to drop dead on the way to take a piss in the morning either.

“Comeon,” Sean begged over the intercom. “You’ve got to let me pee by myselfsometime.”

Shit. Billy could hear rustling of blankets and the scooting of that not-bad-actually-pretty-fine body in the sheets. If he didn’t get his ass out of bed and go help, Sean really might give it another go by himself, and they’d end up face-to-face again, and Billy justknewthat was abadthing.

“Not today!” Billy yelled as he ripped off the covers and went thundering out the door and down the hall.

When he got to Sean’s room, Sean was at the dresser near his door, leaning on it heavily and looking triumphant.

“I could have made it,” he said mildly, but he was breathing hard, so Billy was going to assume he was fronting to make up for the fact that he’d done a dumb thing.

“Sure. You also could have crumpled down, repunctured your lung, and started all over again,” Billy snapped. “Now here—you know the drill.”

He offered his arm and Sean took it, allowing Billy to guide him to the bathroom for his morning ablutions.

This time Billy threw the guy a bone and waited outside the bathroom, which he’d been doing on and off for the last couple of days. The rule had been that Sean would ask for his help getting into the shower, and Billy was leaning against the wall, valiantly tryingnotto think about Sean Kryzynski naked and healthy and wet, when he heard the toilet flush, and then, before he could respond, he heard the water running in the shower.

With a grunt—and probably more panic than necessary—he threw the door open just in time to watch Sean safely grab the rails and help himself into the shower, completely naked.

The protest he was about to make dried up in his throat.

Lean and pale, with still-defined runner’s muscle in his legs, at his hips, and in his abdomen, his surprisingly wide shoulders were the exact ratio to those lean hips that turned Billy’s key.

Sean didn’t see his assessment; he was too busy lowering himself into the shower chair under the spray and getting his sponge and soap.

Billy managed to make himself move in time to close the curtain, and he heard Sean’s gasp of surprise.

“Thanks,” he squeaked. “I’d forgotten.”

“Yeah, well, save myself some cleanup,” Billy told him, and because Sean couldn’t see him, he held his hand to his bare chest and tried to catch his breath. Nice. Just…veryfrickin’nice. He’d been wondering when he’d get to look at that body as a man and not a person in charge, but he hadn’t been expecting that sensibility to sweep over him like wildfire and destroy all his equilibrium in one heartbeat.

Sean—dammit, he couldn’t call him Kryzynski anymore, not after that strange, intimate,necessaryconversation in the lamplight when Sean’s hair, growing long, had flopped over his brow and he’d stared at Billy like everything he saidmattered—took short, efficient showers, so Billy had to ask.

“Hey, I’m running to my bedroom to grab a shirt, okay? Don’t, you know, levitate out of your shower chair while I’m gone. It’s slippery out here.”

Sean’s raspy chuckle did something to Billy’s insides that he really hated, mostly because he didn’t hate it at all. “Surprised ya, didn’t I?”

He was so damned proud of himself Billy couldn’t yell at him. “Yeah, you’re something. Let me go put a shirt on and I’ll try to deal with being obsolete.”

He heard that raspy chuckle again and wondered what Sean Kryzynski sounded like when his lungs were fully functioning and he could run around the block.

And if it would do the same thing to Billy’s stomach then that it did now.

“I DIDN’Tmean to hurt your feelings,” Sean said later over breakfast. Simple milk and cereal today, by Sean’s request. Apparently the eggs were starting to make him feel bloated.

“What? No!” Billy shook his head and stuck to his fruit and cottage cheese. Which he hated, by the way. One of the great ironies of life was how much he’d hated cottage cheese as a kid and had been forced to eat it because it was good for him, and how much he hated it now as an adult and couldn’t escape it for basically the same reason. “You didn’t hurt my feelings. Just surprised me is all. I should have been paying better attention.”