AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Her breathing hitched and her eyes shut, but I didn’t have to wait to know what was happening. She started rambling soft words before I could ask. “You’re here, you’re not a dream. I’m with you. I left. I left Collin—oh God. It was all real. You’re here. I always dream of you, I thought I still was—but you’re here. Oh, Hadley.”
I gently wrapped her body in my arms, and held her as she tried to come to terms with the fact that everything from that day had happened. When her words stopped, I said, “Your family is on their way to Seattle; they’re catching a flight tonight. They’ll keep us updated. They haven’t seen or heard from Collin, and your dad said he’d been watching for cars following them, he thought they were fine.”
Harlow nodded against my chest, and her body relaxed a little more.
When a couple more minutes passed, I pulled away and sat up, then waited while she did the same—but I studied her every move. “How do you feel?”
“Sore,” she murmured, but her eyes flashed away. I knew she was holding back.
“So how do you really feel?”
Harlow chewed on her lower lip and shrugged—even that movement seemed hard to do—but she wouldn’t hold my eyes. “My head is throbbing all over. The back of my body hurts from where I fell and was dropped, but I don’t feel as weak as I did earlier.”
“Good.” I pressed two fingers to her chin and turned her head until she was looking at me. “Don’t hold back with me. I need to know, or I can’t help you. Okay?”
Instead of answering, her eyes went to something past me and widened.
“Can we help you?” I asked before I turned to find the guys in the room again. One was holding a bottle of water; one was holding a bottle of Tylenol. I leaned over and held an arm out so they could put both bottles in my hand; my glare never left them. “You’re acting like a bunch of old fussing women,” I grumbled, and then sat back up.
“You okay?”
“Deacon,” I hissed, and shook my head.
Harlow didn’t answer him, but I don’t think she knew how to. She was still staring at them like she didn’t understand why they were being so nice.
“Thank you, Graham,” I grumbled when he unnecessarily took the to-go boxes and bag of clothes from my nightstand, and then put them on the bed near Harlow’s legs. “Goodbye, Graham and Deacon,” I hinted, and waited until they were gone to say, “They’ve had a change of heart when it comes to you, and I don’t think they know what to do with themselves now that they know what you went through tonight. They bought you a new outfit, and brought us dinner.”
“Oh,” Harlow whispered, still in shock.
“Are you hungry?”
Her eyes darted down to the boxes, and her face twisted. “Not really. Um, I don’t—I don’t eat . . . much.”
“Low, that’s not hard to figure,” I said, and looked pointedly at her.
“It’s hard to with him . . .” She trailed off.
“You don’t have to explain that right now, or ever, if you don’t want. But I need you to eat if you can. You need to put weight back on. You need to have energy, especially after what happened today. So if you think you can eat, then it’s here for you. Okay?”
She nodded, and slowly picked at the food in her box while I ate mine. I only counted five bites small enough for a toddler before she stopped tearing her food into pi
eces and pretending to eat it.
After I was done, I pulled her into my arms and leaned back against the headboard. The relieved sigh and way her body seemed to melt into me made me smile, but I didn’t comment on it. Mostly because we hadn’t talked since we’d started eating. I knew if we talked, we’d have to talk about what to do with Collin, and it was obvious she wasn’t ready to figure that out yet. So I would give her the night if that was what she needed.
Not long after, her mouth parted and her breathing evened out, and minutes later, I followed her into sleep.
Chapter 20
Harlow
Present Day—Thatch
I WOKE SLOWLY. Something about the action felt foreign; normally when I woke, I woke with a start. Though warning bells were going off in my head, my body knew differently. Knew whose arms I was in. Knew I wasn’t in any danger from him. Knew that I didn’t need to be on the defensive from the moment I woke to the moment I fell into a fitful sleep.
Even though it was still dark in Knox’s room, my body was reveling from the best sleep I’d gotten in more than two years. I hadn’t felt this alert or energized in . . . I couldn’t remember how long it had been. I hadn’t felt this relaxed since before I’d married Collin—and that was including the tension in my shoulders and back from worrying over my family and deranged husband.
Sometime in the unknown hours we’d been sleeping, I’d twisted in Knox’s arms so I was partially on my side, partially chest to chest with him. And despite the fear that was slowly moving through my body at what we were up against, I felt myself smile. For years I’d wondered what it would be like to wake up next to this man, and though I knew it could be a thousand times better than it was in this moment, this moment still felt something like bliss.
