“Do not good-morning me in that suspicious voice. Where the fuck are you?”
“In a room.”
“Wow. Love the detail. It really paints the crime scene.”
I rub a hand over my face. “Cassie.”
“No. Don’t you Cassie me. I woke up, and you were gone. Your bed was untouched, and you have not answered any of my eleven tasteful, very restrained messages.”
“You sent eleven messages.”
“Exactly. Restraint. I showed enormous personal growth and you weren’t even there to witness it.”
Behind me, the mattress shifts. I turn my head and see Zane getting out of the bed.
The sheet slides off his hips and every thought in my head forgets where it was going and sits down on the floor.
He stands with his back half turned to me, all hard muscle, broad shoulders and sleep-rough hair. Morning light cuts across him in warm lines and drags over the shape of his arms. The tattooed and scarred geography of a man who has been through hell and come out the other side looking like that, which frankly feels like a violation of some natural law about consequences. He bends to pick up his jeans from the floor.
My mouth goes completely dry.
“Skylar?” Cassie says.
“Hmm?”
“Oh my God.” Her voice sharpens. “Did you just hmm me? You only hmm when you are distracted or looking at carbs.”
“I’m listening.”
“No you are not. You have that voice.”
“What voice?”
“The voice of a woman staring at something she knows will cost her, yet she has decided to buy it anyway.”
Zane finds his jeans. He pulls them on, one leg at a time, slow and unhurried, the way he does everything. I watch the muscles shift across his back and have absolutely no remorse about it.
“Skylar.” Cassie’s voice drops into that particular deadly calm she reserves for moments of genuine suspicion. “Where the fuck are you?”
I drag my eyes away from Zane with an effort that deserves formal recognition. “I’m not with Damien.”
A pause.
Then Cassie gasps so loudly that I have to pull the phone away from my ear to protect what is left of my hearing.
I glance toward the window. “I went for a drive.”
“Oh, brilliant. Very calming. Very serial-killer-documentary-opening. Where did the drive end, Sky?”
I glance at Zane.
He is watching me with too much amusement for this hour of the morning—his jeans half buttoned, his arms crossed, as if he has nowhere to be and every intention of enjoying whatever this phone call becomes.
“The workshop,” I say.
Cassie goes silent. Which is so much worse than her yelling. Cassie silent is Cassie loading. Then, very slowly, she says, “You went to Rainer’s workshop.”
“Yes.”
