“I don’t think I belong here,” she whispered.
Lucien felt as if she’d punched him, and he inwardly recoiled from her words, but the only response he showed to them was a clenching of his hands. “You don’t think you belong with me?”
Callie blinked at his strange response. “With you?”
Lucien rose from the bed and paced over to the window. He pulled back the curtains to reveal his view of the garden below. Before Kadence arrived, the garden was overgrown and ugly.
But Kadence, Simone, and some of the others had pruned, weeded, and planted it into shape. Now, it was beautiful, with its vast array of colors, plants, birds, and butterflies flitting around.
Before, he’d never looked at it, but since Kadence’s arrival, he often found himself admiring his view of it. He tried to let its beauty soothe the demon within him, but it refused to be appeased by plants. It wanted blood; it wantedher.
He settled the curtain back into place and turned to face her. “Yes, with me.”
Callie’s heart hammered with excitement and apprehension. Despite their awful start, this past week had been some of the best days of her life. However… “I barely know you.”
But that wasn’t entirely true. Over their time in the hotel, they’d shared a lot of their history. She’d revealed a lot to him, and he knew her as well as some of her closest friends, only a whole lot more intimately.
“No, that’s not right,” she said. “I’ve come to know you fairly well, but we haven’t known each other for long.”
“Does that matter?”
“Yes!”
And then she took the time to really consider his question. Did it matter?
So what if they only met each other a little over a week ago? In that time, she’d come to know him better than her high school boyfriend and her college one. And she felt a whole lot more for him than she had for either of them. She’d considered herself in love with them, but those feelings were a pale comparison to the ones Lucien evoked in her.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”
Lucien walked over to stand before her. Sensing her uncertainty, he rested his hands on her shoulders before pulling her close. He hugged her as she stood unmoving for a minute. Then her arms came around him, and her fingers bit into his back as she hugged him.
“Why don’t we take it one day at a time?” he suggested. “And see how it goes.”
And during those days and nights, he planned to make her so happy she wouldn’t want to leave.
Callie closed her eyes and listened to the reassuring beat of his heart as she held him. “I still have to go home for some of my things.”
Lucien wasn’t going to argue with her about it. “We’ll talk about it again in a week.”
“My rent is due soon; I have to get into my bank account so that I can pay him, and I need to let my boss know I’m not coming back. Though, I’m sure he’s figured that out.”
A new possibility occurred to her. “My friends and boss have probably reported me missing. The police could be looking for me.”
“The Savages probably already took care of that in case you turned up again. I’m sure they’ve gone to the police and buried your case. If you’d died like they planned, they wouldn’t have bothered, but since you survived, they’ll cover their tracks.”
That realization made nausea churn in her belly. “If my landlord has heard anything about me being a missing person, he’ll throw my stuff on the curb the second he doesn’t get his rent. I love my place, but the guy is an asshole, and I can’t let that happen. I have to get into my bank account and send him a check or something.”
“The Savages will be watching your accounts. They won’t be able to figure out where you are, but if they see you pay your landlord, they’ll keep an eye on your apartment.”
“That can’t happen,” she muttered.
“I’ll pay him.”
“I don’t want you to pay him. I have money; I just need to get to it.”
She still had most of the money from her father’s life insurance policy, and she’d saved some from her job over the years. She planned to buy a small farm where she would have plenty of room to rehabilitate injured wild animals and foster shelter animals.
She had a vivid image of her future home in mind, so she was saving up enough to buy the house of her dreams while making sure her mortgage payments were low enough to live out those dreams.
