Page 281 of Romeo

Sleep disappeared from her eyes. “What?”

I kept my arm around her and held her gaze.

“Go get dressed and pack a bag.”

Her brows drew together. “Why?”

Because I had been five minutes away from being too late. Because fifteen hundred miles had stopped feeling like distance and started feeling like negligence. Because Marcus Webb was dead and there would always be another threat I couldn’t stop from Nebraska.

I brushed my thumb across her cheek.

“We’re leaving.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Fiona

I sat up so quickly that Jasper’s arm slipped from around my shoulders and landed across the back of the couch. For several seconds, I could only stare at him, trying to decide whether I had heard him correctly or whether exhaustion had finally scrambled something in my head.

“Where are we going?”

He didn’t answer right away. Of course he didn’t. Jasper had a maddening talent for looking directly at me while deciding exactly how much truth he intended to give me. He never lied. I’d figured that out months ago. He simply chose his words with enough care that sometimes it took me hours to realize he had answered a completely different question to the one I asked.

“Home,” he finally said.

Nebraska.

My stomach tightened at the thought, but not in the way it would have a year ago. Nebraska had stopped being some abstract place in the middle of the country. It was Diamond Creek. The clubhouse. King and Grace and everyone else whose names had slowly become familiar through Jasper’s stories. It was snow deeper than I wanted to think about, an imaginary kitchen he insisted needed windows facing east, and a porch we had argued about even though neither of us owned the house attached to it.

It was also miles from everything I knew.

I looked toward the staircase, automatically listening for any movement from Granny’s room.

In a blink, I was back in the parking lot. Cold brick against my shoulder. Fingers digging into my wrist. The horrible weight of another body trapping mine. My skin crawled beneath clothes that had already been changed, as if that man’s hands had somehow stayed behind when everything else had been washed away.

Jasper saw it happen. His expression changed and his hand settled against the side of my neck, his thumb moving once beneath my ear. “Don’t go back there, Ma Belle.”

“I’m trying not to.”

“I know.” His gaze stayed on mine while his fingers continued that slow movement, giving me something else to concentrate on. “But before you go upstairs and start throwing shit in a bag because I told you to, I need an answer from you.”

That should have annoyed me. Under almost any other circumstances, it would have. Instead, I noticed the way he was watching me. The confident Cajun who’d been flirting for months was gone, and in his place was a scared man.

“What answer?”

His mouth curved slightly. “You know damn well what answer.”

I did. That was the problem.

He shifted toward me, resting one arm along the back of the couch while his other hand remained against my neck. “I’m done pretending, Fiona. Been done for a long fucking time, if I’m being truthful, but I kept telling myself you needed room to figure out what you wanted without me standing over you acting like the possessive asshole I am.”

A breath escaped me that almost became a laugh. “You hid that really well.”

“I thought so.” The brief spark in his eyes faded almost as quickly as it appeared. “I’m serious, baby. I need to know if you’re ready for me to stop holding back. Not tonight because you’re scared. Not because some motherfucker put his hands on you and now you think you owe me something because I showed up. I need to know if this is what you wanted before tonight.”

The answer came easily.

Everything around it didn’t.