I laugh once, sharp and ugly. “Jesus. Did you…? Did we…?”
“No. You were freezing.”
I stare at him.
“You don’t get to say that like it explains anything.”
His pale eyes hold mine. Steady. Unblinking.
“You were shaking so hard I thought your teeth would crack. The drugs were wearing off. I couldn’t get you warm, so I got in bed and held you still.” His voice stays level. “That is all I did.”
Heat surges into my face, hot and humiliating.
I hate that some part of me already knows he is telling the truth.
I remember fragments. The dark. The cold. Trembling so violently it hurt. Something warm and firm around me, dragging me back from the edge.
I hate that my body remembers the comfort before it remembers the fear.
“You could be lying.”
“I could.”
The answer hits me harder than if he denied it.
No pretty promises. No offended act.
Just truth.
“But I’m not.”
The air conditioner rattles in the silence.
I grip the lamp until my fingers ache.
He glances at it once, then back at me. “You planning to swing again?”
“I might.”
One corner of his mouth shifts.
Not a smile exactly. Something rougher. More tired.
“I believe that.”
My pulse stumbles.
It makes no sense. None. I should be scared and only scared. Instead, I am scared and furious and painfully aware that even rumpled from sleep, even with me threatening him with a motel lamp, he is the kind of man women write stupid songs about. Big and scarred and broad enough to block out half the room. The kind of face that looks better for being a little broken. The kind of eyes that should belong to a saint in a painting and somehow ended up in the head of a man who looks like he kills people for a living.
I hate that I notice any of it.
“What is this?” I point at the room with the lamp. “Why did you bring me here?”
His gaze flicks once around the motel room, then back to me. “Because after I took you out of that cabin, we needed somewhere nobody would think to look right away.”
Something cold slides through me.
“So we’re hiding.”
