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But it didn’t, and I frowned.
The door had been locked, I knew that much.
But…the alarm hadn’t been set.
What the fuck?
“Monster, hurry it up,” I ordered, holding the door for him.
He went out, took a piss, and came right back in before heading to my bedroom.
Thinking that tomorrow I would need to call the alarm company about the problem, I locked the door behind me and then went to the bedroom without turning on a single light.
When I got there, I started stripping out of my clothes and dropped everything in a large pile next to the bathroom door, then flipped on the bathroom light. Reaching into the shower, I cranked it up to the hottest it’d go, then stepped inside without waiting for it to get all the way warmed up.
It took me all of two minutes to wash and rinse, and I was out before the hot water had a chance to have any effect. Moments after stepping out, I dried off with a hand towel since I couldn’t find any actual towels, and then put on my boxer briefs that were sitting on the counter that I hoped were of the clean variety.
I had a feeling that my housekeeper had picked them up and left them on the counter for me to see, wondering if they were clean or dirty.
The thing was that I didn’t put my clothes away. They all sat in a large pile at the bottom of the bed, and sometimes they fell onto the floor while I was sleeping. Which also happened to be where I kept my dirty ones.
This happened a few times a week, and the housekeeper—Rome’s wife, Izzy—tried to do her best to separate out clean from dirty. The ones she had questions about usually went on the counter in my bathroom where my hamper sat that rarely got used except for dirty towels.
It was when I was flipping off the light in the bathroom, about to dive head first into the bed, that I saw that the lump I’d once thought was my pile of clothing to put away, wasn’t my clean clothes. The pile was a person.
I froze, fury roaring through my veins, and stared at the small lump.
Then that lump rolled over, revealing semi-wet brown hair and a mass of curls.
Everything inside of me froze at seeing her in my bed.
I walked over to it quietly, staring at the woman that I could now tell apart from her sister and felt everything that’d been rioting inside of me still.
I’d known, of course, that the body that’d been dead at the sight wasn’t her. I’d known…but seeing with my own eyes was crucial. I’d been so fucking worried.
Theo.
She was in my bed.
Sleeping.
She was here.
Alive.
Not carried away by storms. Not lying dead in a ditch, miles away from where she was supposed to be.
And exactly where she should be.
I didn’t wake her to ask her how she got here.
I also didn’t think that it mattered.
Not right then, anyway.
Instead of waking her up and peppering her with the questions that were on the tip of my tongue, I only walked around to the other side of the bed and climbed in, being careful not to get too close to her.
When I woke up, I’d ask her what the hell had happened.
But for now, she was safe and exactly where she should be.
***
Theo
I woke up and everything hurt.
My head. My back. My hands.
Even my fingernails.
I groaned and rolled over, hitting something solid, and knew without even opening my eyes that the person in the bed beside me was Liner.
The solid man groaned and rolled, taking half the covers with him.
Smiling at the hog that he was, I got up and sat up on the bed, allowing my feet to dangle down.
They didn’t touch the floor. That was because Liner had a bed fit for a king.
Literally and figuratively.
The thing was at least four feet off the ground, and last night I’d had to practically drag myself into it using the flat sheet as a rope.
Monster, who’d been lying at the end of the bed, stood up and did a full doggy stretch.
His eyes were on me and his tail was wagging.
I grinned and got up, practically falling out of the bed.
A groan nearly escaped my tightly clenched lips, and I breathed out roughly.
God, I hurt.
Bad.
So bad, in fact, that I might’ve needed to go to the hospital.
Yet, doing that would’ve alerted my father that I was alive, and for now, I was happy with him thinking that I wasn’t.
The only problem I could see was that Tyson would have to be informed.
I shuffle-stepped to the bathroom, my face relaying the pain I was in the entire way.
After relieving myself, washing my hands, and using a bit of toothpaste on my finger to half-ass brush my teeth with, my ankle was once again throbbing almost as bad as it did last night.
