Page 43 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

He dropped both hands as quickly as if she’d burned him, but he still stood so close that if she had shifted her weight onto her toes, her chest would have touched his.

“When can I see you again,friend?” he asked, the “friend” trapped somewhere between a purr and a growl.

“Friday?”

“It’s Monday. I dinnae want to wait until then to see you.”

She had to get out of there. If she didn’t, she would probably do something decidedly un-friendlike.

“Friday,” she repeated.

She needed that time. She needed the space of four days to sort out her brain and her feelings where Callum was concerned. She was still angry with him. Wasn’t she? Her head still felt like it was spinning from everything she’d learned that night.

He looked like he would argue, and she knew that he was more than capable of it. They were both stubborn. But she hoped he wouldn’t. She needed this. She needed him to grant her that space willingly. She didn’t want to have to fight for it. She was so tired of fighting.

Jory wondered if Callum could read minds because he took a step back, putting enough distance between them that she felt as if she could finally breathe properly.

“Verra well. Friday. I’ll pick you up at six.”

“Seven.”

“Six thirty.”

Jory snorted a laugh. “Are you just arguing for the sake of arguing?”

His mouth twisted again, that would-be smile. “Perhaps. Are you?”

She huffed a sigh. “Fine. Six thirty. What should I wear?”

He thought about that for a minute. “I’ll call you.”

“You don’t have my number.”

Without taking his eyes off of her, Callum reached over and snatched his phone off the desk, unlocked it quickly, and handed it to her. She added her contact information quickly and gave it back.

Jory adjusted her purse strap. “Okay then. I guess I’ll get out of your hair.”

“Aye,” he replied, and she ducked around him. But as her shoulder brushed his, he said, “Jory.”

She froze, feeling the strength of his arm against hers, his tension radiating off of him in waves.

“Yes?”

“Do friends hug?”

Jory felt as if she had somehow inched her way into the middle of a frozen pond, the ice new and blue and unstable. One wrong move, and she’d be doomed. She could have kept walking. Sheshouldhave kept walking. That would have been the safest way to prevent the ice from shattering and swallowing her whole. But Jory wasn’t good at doing the things sheshould, at least not where Callum was concerned.

She heard herself say, “Friends can hug.”

Carefully, he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close. She rested her cheek against his chest, loving the way he set his chin against the top of her head. There was silence beneath her ear, but it didn’t fill her with despair like it had behind Hank’s shed. With or without a heartbeat, he was very much alive. She knew this now. She felt herself sinking into him. Just for a moment, she told herself.

Jory left him standing there, his hands at his side with a look on his face that was, at once, determined and despondent, and climbed the steps to the main level, saying a goodbye at the top before she opened the vault door. Someone had closed the closet door so no sunlight streamed into the vault when she opened the hatch. Callum must have done it while she’d been sleeping. Or maybe she forgot closing it herself the night before.

She’d gotten very little sleep and was dehydrated and hungry. She needed to go home and get water, breakfast, and coffee before she started shaking. Jory opened the closet door absentmindedly, shutting it quietly behind her and turning for the front door.

“Good morning,” a voice said, and she shrieked.

It was him. The menacing, heavily tattooed man that Callum had hired to track Esther, the one that had come with Callum to Hank’s house. He stood in the cabin’s kitchen wearing black soccer shorts and nothing else. His chest and arms were fully covered with brightly colored ink, and his feet were bare. He held a skillet in one hand and a spatula in the other.