"Go to sleep, Anna. Leave in the morning. Please."
He turned and walked down the hallway. I watched him go. Bare feet on the wooden floor, back straight, hands clenched at his sides. He didn't look back.
I went into the guest room, closed the door, and leaned against it. My pulse was everywhere. My face was hot. My lips were tingling from a kiss that didn’t happen and the ghost of his breath was still on my skin. I was in so much trouble it wasn’t even funny.
I was impressed by his control. I was also furious about it. The man had stood inches from my face and told me he wanted to do unspeakable things to my mouth and then said goodnight and walked away like he had somewhere better to be. Who does that? Who says that and then leaves? It was infuriating and attractive, and the combination was making me want to scream into his expensive pillow.
I tossed and turned and punched the pillow into a different shape that didn't help. Turned again. Stared at the rain streaking down the window, then the ceiling, then the window again like either one was going to offer me a solution.
I was going to combust. I was going to lie in this bed and think about Jace Hunter until I literally caught fire and they’d find my ashes in the morning and the cause of death would be listed as acute sexual frustration and it would be his fault.
Sometime past midnight, I heard the piano.
Muffled through walls and distance, a melody I didn’t recognize. Slow. Aching.
I lay in the dark and listened.
I didn’t know the song. It didn’t matter. I knew what it sounded like. It sounded like want and restraint and the spacebetween two people who kept finding each other in hallways and not closing the distance.
It sounded like us.
I closed my eyes.
I fell asleep to the sound of his hands on the keys.
CHAPTER 18
Jace
She was asleep in my cabin and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Down the hall. In a room I’d never imagined anyone would use because the cabin existed for the opposite of company. It existed for silence and solitude and the controlled absence of other people.
And Anna Wilson was sleeping in it. In my robe. In my sheets.
I sat at the piano and played. The piece was my mother’s. Catherine’s favorite. She taught me when I was six, sitting beside me on the bench, guiding my small hands across the keys. It was one of the few memories from before the basement that wasn’t contaminated.
The feel of her fingers over mine. Her patience. The way she hummed along when I got the notes right and laughed when I got them wrong, and the laughter was the kind that made you want to get it wrong on purpose.
The melody filled the cabin. Slow, aching, and I thought about the woman down the hall and what it meant that she’d driven two hours in a rainstorm to find me.
I finished the piece. Sat in the silence. Then I went to the studio.
The portrait was waiting. Her face, half-finished. I picked up the charcoal and worked. The thing that had eluded me for days came easily now because she was in the house and the memory wasn’t distant anymore. It was warm and sleeping twenty-three steps away. Her jaw. Her eyes. The expression from the elevator, the lips that whispered I’m here and meant it.
I drew until my fingers were black and the portrait was complete. I stepped back and she looked back at me from the paper with an expression that said everything I couldn’t say out loud.
I cleaned my hands. Twice. Went to bed, but didn’t sleep. Lay in the dark with the image of her burned into my eyelids and my body responding in ways I couldn’t override, and didn’t want to.
Morning came gray and wet. The rain had softened but not stopped. I made coffee and checked the road conditions on my phone.
Flooded. Mudslides overnight. The mountain route was closed. Advisory warning on the county website said no travel until further notice.
She couldn’t leave.
I stared at the screen and I didn’t know if what I felt was relief or terror. Both, probably. Both at the same time, which seemed to be the permanent state of every emotion I had concerning Anna Wilson.
She walked out of the guest room at half past eight.
