Her head moved.

“I take that as a no.” He gently pried her fingers loose and let his hands travel up her arms to her shoulders. “Can you look at me, please?”

When she slowly raised her head, he noticed her damp cheeks and his gut clenched. Shiori attempted to push her hair out of her face, but he stilled the movement.

“Let me.” Knox brushed her hair from her beautiful face. “Were you listening?”

She nodded.

“Guess I forgot your ears work even if your mouth doesn’t.”

Shiori snatched up her notebook and wrote furiously before she showed him what she’d written.

YOU STOOD UP FOR ME.

“Always. Why are you surprised by that, Nushi?”

I’M NOT. BUT RONIN CLEARLY WAS. I WANT TO YELL AT HIM TO OPEN HIS EYES. I WANT TO KISS YOU UNTIL NEITHER OF US CAN BREATHE. CLEARLY I’M AN EMOTIONAL BASKET CASE, AND I HATE THAT YOU’RE SEEING ME LIKE THIS.

“When I look at you, all I see is the beautiful woman I’m in love with.”

Once again, Shiori didn’t respond in kind. He’d told her several times since her accident that he loved her. She’d smiled, gotten teary-eyed, but she hadn’t repeated those words back to him.

She’s suffering from a serious mouth injury and talking is the one thing she’s not supposed to do. You bark at her every time she tries to speak, so what do you expect?

Knox kissed the tips of her fingers. “Kitten, it’ll all work out. It always does.”

But he had an unsettling feeling that might not be true this time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

IT’D been a week since the accident. Why did she still feel like she’d gotten hit by a truck?

Oh, right, because she actually had.

Shiori closed her eyes. She felt like dog shit. She’d finished her cycle of antibiotics three days ago, so that hadn’t been the reason for her queasiness.

She attributed her tiredness to stress from Ronin being back. He’d thrown himself back into Black Arts business, questioning Knox on everything to the point Knox earned sympathy from everyone around him, even Deacon.

The number of students enrolled in jujitsu classes had remained the same the last three months. No growth, but no losses either. When Ronin asked why the numbers were static, citing ABC’s increased enrollment numbers, Shiori kept mum. It wasn’t her place to stick up for Knox—he hadn’t asked for her backing.

Knox had answered honestly; Ronin’s directive to him was to keep things going with the dojo as they were. That’s what Knox had done. If Ronin had asked for them to try to increase enrollment numbers while he’d been gone for a quarter of the year, Knox told him he would’ve refused. When Sensei asked why, Knox said they didn’t have enough instructors for the number of students they already had enrolled. And Ronin being gone had left them short-staffed. He worried they’d lose some of the instructors they had if things didn’t change.

Of course Ronin hadn’t wanted to hear that. Then, when he demanded to meet with the instructors, it wasn’t meant to be taken as slap in the face to Knox, but that’s how it’d come across to him—and to everyone else. It didn’t matter that Ronin’s meetings verified what Knox had told him, that the instructors couldn’t work six days a week because everyone had other employment obligations; Ronin had become obsessed with fixing things.

When Ronin asked for her input, she demurred. He pressed her on why she didn’t have an opinion since she’d been part of the staff for several months. Choose her brother over her lover? It was a lose-lose situation. That’s why she’d refused to get dragged into it. But her bottom line was the same as Knox’s; if Ronin wanted to grow the dojo, he needed to hire additional staff.

This morning Knox had left early at Ronin’s behest. She yawned and forced herself out of Knox’s comfy bed. She headed to the kitchen and saw he’d put out a mug and a tea bag for her. Such a sweet, thoughtful man. She loved that he did little things like that for her, not because she expected it as his Mistress, but just because he wanted to.

After setting the kettle on the stove, she tracked down her cell phone. Lucky thing Knox had plugged it in for her last night. It’d been completely dead. There were missed calls from a couple of clients through Okada. Her e-mail had exploded in the last day, so she tried to organize it.

The kettle whistled. She poured water into the mug, wrapping her hands around the ceramic, letting the heat warm them. Closing her eyes, she breathed in the scented steam. But the second the chamomile hit her nose, she gagged.