Page 44 of Still Missing You

“Okay.” Dylan lets out a shaky breath. “Okay. That’s good. That’s good.”

He presses his forehead briefly to my shoulder, a silent, trembling moment of grounding, then straightens.

“I’m sorry,” Dylan says, voice cracking. “I should’ve woken up sooner. I should never have gotten you mixed up in this. I dragged you into this, and you got hurt because of it.”

“Hey.” I reach up and cup his face with my hand, forcing him to meet my gaze. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

He shakes his head and says again, “You could’ve been killed.”

“I’m okay,” I try to assure him, and despite feeling like I just spent the last twenty minutes in a blender, I’m pretty sure I am. “Help me up.”

Dylan shakes his head. “I don’t think you should move until the paramedics look at you. I need to call 911, but my phone’s upstairs, and I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“I’m pretty sure our intruder...”

“No, I know the minute I go upstairs, you’ll get up and probably try to go after the guy.”

I chuckle. “Yeah, no, not tonight.”

“When I got to the top of the stairs, and I saw you on the floor—” His breath catches. “I thought you were dead.” The idea clearly still terrifies him.

“Not tonight,” I say again.

Dylan leans down and wraps his arms around me carefully, mindful of my injuries, and I close my eyes and let myself lean into him, even though I know better.

For a second, the chaos fades—the intruder, Matthew, even the pain. For just a moment, it’s just us, tangled together on the cold wooden floor, breathing each other in.

“What in the hell?” The overhead light turns on, and Jim stands at the top of the hallway, looking at us like an alien species. In his defense, he probably didn’t often come across two men in their underwear holding each other in his foyer.

“I was asleep in the back,” he says, as if answering the question before it’s asked.

We clearly woke him. He’s dressed in thin, striped white and blue pajamas, an undershirt that had likely started off as white but had yellowed over time and clings to his rounded belly. His hair stands up at odd angles, and he blinks at us owlishly.

“Someone broke into our room,” Dylan says, easing away from me, which I don’t like, and I have to bite my tongue to stop myself from asking him to stay. “Hunter fell down the stairs. Can you call 911?”

“Who was in your room?” Jim asks.

“It was too dark to see,” I tell him. The adrenaline is ebbing away, and I’m starting to feel every stair I fell down. I try to shift, but pain flares, and I let out a slow hiss.

“No moving,” Dylan says, then turns his attention to Jim. “Please, can you call for help?”

“Of course, yes.” Jim hurries away; I assume to find a phone.

“You’re probably freezing. I should grab you a blanket.”

Pants would be better. But instead, I grab Dylan’s hand. “Please don’t leave me.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.

Dylan squeezes my hand and brushes my hair back from my forehead with his other hand. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Chapter Seventeen

Dylan

It’s a full day later before we leave the hospital and start back to the inn. Paramedics insisted on taking Hunter to the hospital, which I completely agreed with, despite Hunter arguing that he was fine. He clearly was not.

While the doctor who treated him assured us that most of his injuries were superficial, mostly scrapes and bruises and a mild concussion, which, if I’m honest, didn’t sound all that superficial to me, his knee is another story. It was painful and badly swollen.

A corticosteroid injection gave Hunter almost instant relief from the inflammation, but the doctor warned him that if he didn’t go easier on himself, he’d be looking at knee replacement surgery sooner than later.