Instead of answering, she blushed. And he grinned because, yeah. She’d definitely seen something she liked.

Snatching the gauze and tube of ointment from his hands, she vanished into the kitchen.

A minute later, a burst of lightning lit up the living room like daylight, immediately followed by a thundering boom that shook the house and rattled the windows and actually changed the rhythm of his heartbeat.

From the kitchen came a cry and a crash, and he went running.

Piper was at the sink staring out the window, both hands on her mouth, a broken glass at her feet, eyes wide and unseeing on the storm outside. There was a tree branch brushing against the window and he moved toward her, intending to pull her away in case it broke. But the moment he set his hands on her shoulders, she jerked and whipped around, catching him with a surprise roundhouse kick to the gut.

“Oh my God,” he heard her gasp as he straightened gingerly. “I’m so sorry!”

“No problem,” he said on a rough exhale, rubbing his abs as he eyed her. “And here I was worried about not sparring with my team while I was here. Maybe we should hit the mats together sometime.”

She didn’t smile. Her eyes were still huge and haunted, hollow in a way he understood better than he wanted to.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s okay. You didn’t hurt me.”

Closing her eyes, she nodded and turned away again, only to jump at the next flash of lightning and the immediate, earsplitting boom of thunder.

She was terrified of the storm. “Piper.”

“I’m fine.”

“I know,” he murmured, gently turning her to face him. Slowly she opened those slay-me eyes of hers and leveled him with all the emotion swimming in them. “Bad memory?”

She hesitated and then gave a barely there shoulder lift. “The thunder gets me. Reminds me of the bombs.”

Bombs? She was shaking almost violently now, and he ran his hands up and down her arms, realizing she wasn’t all the way back with him, but somewhere else, somewhere far away. “You’re cold and wet. Let’s—”

“If you say get naked so we don’t die of hypothermia, I might kick you again.”

Feisty, even when she was down. He liked that, very much. “Actually, it’d be only fair since you’ve already seen me naked.”

“Keep dreaming.”

She said this utterly without heat, and he got even more worried. “Piper. What can I do to help?”

“I’m—”

“Fine. Yeah, yeah, I know. But maybe I’m not.”