He'd never know.
I pressed my chin to the top of Cat's small warm head and told myself that was true until the kitchen stopped feeling like a place I was leaving and started feeling like a place I was staying.
It didn't take as long as it should have.
"Rise and shine!"
The bedroom door swung open hard enough to rattle the frame.
I didn't move. Didn't open my eyes. Just tightened my grip on the pillow over my face and waited for the nightmare to end.
It did not end.
"I will end you." My voice was muffled by the pillow but surely he picked up what I was layin' down.
The mattress dipped under his weight and the pillow was ripped clean off my head, flooding my vision with the cruelty of Saturday morning sunlight cutting through the one window in the room that wasn't boarded up.
"Brody." My voice came out like gravel dragged through tar. "It is too early for you."
"It's eight-thirty."
"I said what I said."
He was sitting on the edge of the mattress, boot heels on the floor, already fully dressed and disgustingly alert, his hat in one hand and that grin stretched wide across his stupidly handsome face. The same face that had been pressed into my hair last night in the barn. That had kissed my temple with his wrists looped in his own belt. That had saidpleasein a voice that had no business being quiet.
I waited for it. For the question, the look, some acknowledgment of the fact that I'd belted his hands behind his back and dry humped him into oblivion and then peeled out of the ranch like my tail was on fire. Some version ofwhat the hell was thatorare you okayorwant to talk about it.
He said nothing about any of it.
I narrowed my eyes.
He just sat there grinning at me like a golden retriever on his best day.
"You're not gonna ask," I said.
"Nope." Completely unbothered. Like we were discussing the weather. "Reckon you'll tell me when you're ready."
I stared at him for a long moment, searching for the angle. Some men used silence as a tactic—let it pool up around you until you filled it yourself just to make it stop. I'd learned to outlast that particular brand of manipulation before I could legally drink.
But Brody wasn't doing that. He just… meant it.
Which was somehow more disarming than any angle would've been.
I narrowed my eyes at him.
He reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear.
I kept narrowing.
He kept smiling.
"You're not human," I told him.
"Been said before."
I stood and dragged both hands through my hair. "I'm taking a shower."
His brows waggled. "Want some company?"
