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I flailed in his hold.
Ezra only tightened his massive arms. “We can’t have you breaking a leg on my watch, now, can we?”
“Ezra. This is ridiculous. Put me down.”
“Sure thing, Little Trespasser,” he said in that casual, infuriating way. The lights on a truck that was as giant as the man flashed right beside us, and he opened the passenger-side door with one hand without losing his grip and effortlessly plopped me into the front seat. “There you go. As requested.”
Frustration collided with the attraction.
He gave it no heed and instead reached in and buckled me, his enormous being leaning in to snap it into place. He grinned as if he’d shoved whatever had happened between us inside into a steel barrel. “Safety first.”
He slammed my door shut, jogged around the front, and climbed into the driver’s seat. The engine roared to life when he pushed the button.
“You are infuriatingly overbearing, Ezra Patterson.” I was close to panting from the conflict that he cast.
He put it in drive, and I almost missed when he mumbled under his breath as he pulled out onto the street, “Apparently, I can’t help myself when it comes to you.”
Silence rasped around us as he began to travel up the street before he finally cut into the tension. “Where are you staying? Tell me it’s not in your car.” He attempted to inject some of that lightness into his tone.
It got squashed when I murmured, “Nothing has changed since the last time we talked. I’m still staying at the motel.”
His jaw ticked, and his hand flexed on the steering wheel in some kind of restraint, the veins bulging out.
God, why did his hands have to be sexy, too?
He made the next left, weaving us through town. His disapproval was so thick I couldn’t do anything but sit there and chew on my bottom lip. He didn’t seem to like that very much, either, since he glowered every time he glanced over, his breaths heavy and shallow as he pulled into the motel parking lot.
“You can just drop me right here.” I pointed at where Ryder and Dakota had picked me up.
“Not going to happen.”
He parked in an open spot, and he put the truck into park but didn’t turn it off. I went to climb out, but he reached out to stop me.
Flames leapt up my arm.
If he kept this up, I was going to be completely incinerated by the end of the night.
“I don’t like you staying here. I want you to take up my offer and come stay at my guest house.”
Conflict rolled through me, and I stared out the windshield at the crummy motel in front of us. “I keep telling you it’s a bad idea.”
“I don’t care. It’s a safer place than this.”
“Well, I care. You just…pushed me away when we were dancing like you couldn’t handle the sight of me, and now you’re asking me to come live a hundred feet from you? I don’t know what you want from me, Ezra.”
Vulnerability seeped out with the admission.
Crap, I was a fool, admitting that it had hurt my feelings that he’d let that other guy cut in, but the alcohol had the words tumbling free before I had the chance to think through their circumstances.
Ezra roughed one of those big hands through his hair, and he was staring out the windshield when he rumbled, “Fuck, I’m sorry, Savannah. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just…freaked out because I don’t know how to handle the way you make me feel. My life’s…complicated.”
I refused that stupid bolt of jealousy that screwed through my consciousness because I had no doubt he was talking about his wife. Mixed in with that unwarranted feeling was this fluttering of hope. The type of hope I’d spent most of my life rejecting since it hurt all the more when you realized there was no use in hoping when life was only going to slap you across the face. Drive another knife into your back.
“So is mine.”
He exhaled a long breath before he swiveled to look at me. “I’m afraid you’re just going to…disappear.”
His expression pierced me. An arrow that staked through my heart.
Despair.
Loyalty.
His own flickering hope.
“One day I will.”
Once I found my sister, I’d take her away. Protect her the way she deserved to be.
Ezra flinched like my words caused him physical pain, and I thought I could see a battle go down in those warm brown eyes. He finally seemed to settle on something.
“Everyone deserves a safe place, Savannah. Let me be yours, even if it’s only for a little while.” His voice was rough when he issued it.
A promise.
I guessed I was a fool because I believed it.
“Friends?” I asked him around the jagged rocks in my throat. Knowing the offer was a lie but knowing I’d tell myself a million of them if it meant I got to experience what this was like, even if it was only for a single moment.
