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“Wow. Okay.” Her lips trembled, but she was holding herself together like a champ.
“Do you have any enemies, Emma? An ex-boyfriend? Someone that seemed put out that you rejected him? Anything like that?”
Her gaze went distant, but finally she shook her head. “Not that I can think of. The last guy I dated moved to DC in August, and it was his idea to break up because he was moving. It was amicable.”
Caine’s mind raced. “What about people you see hanging around the neighborhood, the intersection? Men who might hang at that convenience store and maybe could figure out your routine?” Although, he had to admit, while they’d been surveilling Ana Garcia’s house, they hadn’t seen anything like that, and they would’ve noticed.
“Sometimes there’s a homeless man who pushes a big grocery cart of his belongings down the alley out back, but he’s never said a word to me. And everyone who’s ever mentioned him has described him as harmless.”
Blowing out a breath, Caine made mental notes about all these possibilities, but his gut wasn’t yet feeling pulled by any of them.
She pressed her hands together as if she were praying and rested them against her chin. “So, what then? What do I do?”
“We,” he said as an urgent, demanding possessiveness dug its claws into his soul. Dug them in, deep.
And it was, without question, something he’d never felt before in his whole life. When you felt as unworthy as he did, you rarely believed that you deserved to possess anything at all. But now, in the face of her vulnerability, Caine dared to hope that he might deserve...what? Not her, exactly, because after being viewed as no more than a possession by the couple that ran his group home, the idea of possessing another person made his stomach roll. But maybe the chance to get to know her, at the very least. And maybe even the chance to give her the things he’d always wanted but had never been able to have.
Even daring to hope for such things made him feel like the bottom might fall right out from underneath him. And when that happened, he’d just fall and fall and fall…
But if she was going to be brave, he sure the fuck would, too. “We’ll figure this out, Emma. Do you hear me? You’re not in this alone.” His voice sounded like it’d been scoured with sandpaper.
She peered up at him, and her bottom lip trembled a little more. “Promise?”
“Jesus, come here,” he rasped, hauling her in against his chest. He held her tight with one arm and stroked her hair back with the other. And Christ, she felt so good there. So warm and soft against all his cold hardness. So right. These thoughts were so foreign to him he hardly knew what to do with them, but that didn’t make them any less true. He had to swallow around a knot of emotion before he could go on, but when he finally did, his voice was rock solid again. “I give you my word, Emma.”
He made one more promise, too, but this one he kept to himself. Once, he’d failed to protect someone he should’ve. Worse than that, her death had been his fault.
Caine vowed to himself—he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
This time, he’d rather die first.
* * * *
“Are you sure you’ll be okay here?” Emma asked, hardly able to believe…well, so many things, really. Because the night had been one long tidal wave of revelations that left her feeling like she could barely keep her head above water. But, for the current moment, what she almost couldn’t believe was that Caine was sitting on her couch preparing to spend the night in her house.
For one moment, earlier, she’d thought he was leaving, but he’d only gone outside long enough to move his bike off the street to the where the cut-through walkway met the alley behind her house.
So now, she had to believe that he was going to be there for her. Not only because he’d been there for her even when she hadn’t realized it, but also because the promise he’d made to her had been said with so much conviction that even now just the memory of it rushed goosebumps over her skin.
“You’re not in this alone. I give you my word.”
“More than,” he said, tugging the knit hat off his head and scrubbing at his short black hair. He tossed the hat aside. “I don’t require a lot, Emma. Don’t feel like you have to take care of me.”
The words made her ache. Because she didn’t think anyone took care of Caine McKannon. Worse, she feared that quite possibly no one had ever taken care of him. She didn’t know how that could be, but something about him set off the same alarm inside her that rang whenever one of her kids was in some kind of trouble at home.
