Page 121 of Her Ex-Husband's Brother

“It’s the best yeah I’ve got.”

“Okay.” He swallows. “I’ll take it.”

I let my head sink back against the seat. The motion makes my skull throb, not the full white-hot migraine from before, but the leftover echo that’s still painful as hell.

“It’s just so hard to wrap my head around,” I manage. “I went to the doctor a lot when I first got the migraines. They ran tests. Blood work. Imaging. They asked all these questions about stress and sleep and hormones.”

“Probably not tests for whatever the fuck is in silver polish.”

The words come out low and vicious, and something inside me twists because part of me still wants to go on the defense. Not for Jake. I’m finally past defending Jake. But it’s like I’m still trying to hold onto the reality I thought I knew.

I mean, the idea that a person can stand in the kitchen with you and butter your toast and also be calmly, methodically poisoning you? What thefuck?

“Because it’s unbelievable,” I whisper.

“I know.”

“No, I mean…” I turn my head against the seat so I can look at him. “It’s unbelievable until it happens to you. Then it’syour life, and everyone else is standing there squinting at it like maybe you’re being dramatic.”

His jaw tightens. “You’re not dramatic.”

A thin laugh scrapes out of me. “That’s the sexiest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

That gets the smallest shift in his mouth. Not quite a smile, but enough to make warmth move through my chest. Even now. Even with poison in my bloodstream and fear sitting heavy between my ribs, my body knows him. It knows the scrape of his voice in the dark and how his attention feels when it settles on me completely.

It should be terrifying, needing anyone this much.

Instead, it feels like being found.

I glance down at the GPS glowing blue-white between us. Thirty-five more minutes to Houston.

I sink back into the seat and let my eyes close again.

The tires hum over the road. Somewhere in the distance, an eighteen-wheeler groans in the next lane, its lights passing over the inside of the car in bands. Bright. Dark. Bright again. August’s breathing stays careful and measured, but I can feel the tension coming off him like heat.

“I get scared every time you go quiet,” he says. “I know you’re too tired to talk. But I keep looking over and thinking…”

His voice breaks off.

I open my eyes. “Thinking what?”

“That I’m going to miss something.”

Oh.

The answer lands right under my breastbone.

I reach across the console, slow because every movement feels like negotiating with a body full of lead barbells, and I touch the back of his hand.

His fingers turn instantly, catching mine.

“You talk,” I say, my smile small in the dark. “I’ll grunt at emotionally appropriate intervals.”

His thumb drags across my knuckles. Once. Then again.

It shouldn’t feel so indecent, the stroke of his thumb on my hand, but it does. Especially at a time like this. But maybe to spite the situation I’ve found myself in, my mind fixates on the memory of his mouth at my throat and his hands braced on either side of my hips. That look he gets when he’s trying to be good and failing by inches.

He exhales through his nose. “You’re bossy for a woman who almost fainted in a Dollar General bathroom forty minutes ago.”