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She didn’t say a word. Anna knew the two words she was supposed to say… thank you. But she wasn’t sure she’d ever said those in a way that wasn’t sarcastic, and the thought of starting now terrified her.
Would this be held over her head? The clothes, the warmth, the fingers working her back oh so well, the saving her life yesterday? The thought was worrisome. When another shiver ran through her body, it wasn’t from the cold.
Hayden pulled her tighter, not knowing the difference. “Is this warm enough?”
She took a deep breath, unintentionally inhaling that delicious musk that hung around Hayden. Her hands moved over the hard lines of his chest, his abs, back up to his thick arms. Might as well take advantage of her situation, right?
“Y-yes,” she answered. “I’m w-warming up.”
He hugged her tightly to him, the silence stretching around them as her mind raced through what he’d expect from her later.
Favors? Sex? What could he want? Or worse, what if he didn’t want a damn thing? What if Hayden was just… genuinely good, and she’d been wrong about him and the Resistance this entire time?
“I still h-hate you,” she blurted out.
His chuckle shook her and the small bed. “I know,” he whispered against her hair, his hands still gently working her tired muscles. “I know.”
That answer did not satisfy her. At all.
Instead of thinking too much about it, she allowed his warm body and talented hands to lull her to sleep.
Chapter Six
ANNA WAS ODDLY QUIET this morning.
She woke up in his arms, warm and soft and so very naked. There were no quick comebacks, no jokes about the situation. She hadn’t even reiterated how much she disliked him while quickly slipping into the clothing he’d brought for her. She also hadn’t made eye contact, not for more than a moment here and there.
They’d loaded up the jeep, hotwired it to run, and then drove off in complete silence.
For a moment, he’d worried about pushing the body heat thing. His intentions were pure, though he couldn’t say the same for his thoughts once they were beneath the covers together. Still, he never made a move, never allowed his hands to slip too low on her back, never pulled her close enough to feel his rock hard arousal pressing against his zipper. Even when she ran her nails up and down his stomach, his chest, his arms, in a way that was certainly not innocent warmth-seeking, he kept his mouth shut and his body controlled.
Instead of getting too lost in the way her body felt against his own, he tried to focus on their plans. On taking out his father once and for all and righting Hayden’s wrongs from all those years ago. When he’d rushed in, guns blazing and with reckless abandon, and wound up not only failing to take out Greene, but also getting two of his men killed. Two innocent men. The first innocent blood that was on Hayden’s hands… but certainly not the last.
Every person Greene had hurt, directly or by extension, from that day forward? That was on him. Anna included.
There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do to right those wrongs. One of the many reasons the long silence between them worried him. Had he crossed a boundary of hers? Made her uncomfortable? It wasn’t like Anna to not immediately point something like that out, but perhaps he’d scared her in the past couple days. She had seen him kill a man, tear her uniform to shreds, and act particularly volatile. Emotional. Out of control. The very thing he’d spent years fighting not to be, he’d become after just a few days with her.
He needed to address it, like he’d meant to the day before. Of all his skills at reading people, interrogating them, getting them to do his bidding, he had zero skills when it came to talks like this one. It required a certain level of vulnerability, and that? That was a foreign concept as far as Hayden was concerned. Another language. Still, he knew it was a conversation he needed to have.
“I can’t believe how long we slept,” she said, breaking the silence and saving him from his endless thoughts. Insulated leggings covered her legs, with a thick winter jacket on top of the thermal he’d given her. She looked warm, and comfortable, like his teammate rather than an enemy soldier. Perhaps she’d begun to feel that way about him, and that was the cause for the lack of animosity? “Not to blow smoke up your ass, but that was probably the best sleep I’ve had in weeks.”
Hayden huffed out a breath. Was that a compliment? It was hard to hold back his grin, his jaw immediately relaxing. “Where were you sleeping before I found you? After we’d taken the compound?”
She rolled her shoulder back. “Mostly empty houses. They were all falling apart, so I bounced between a few trying to find a better spot. They were all pretty awful.”
He nodded. “The UNR tried to pull the people in closer to the compound. There are a lot of empty homes and buildings surrounding the more populated spots.” She didn’t respond, so he continued. “Funnily, you find fewer empty homes the further out you go. If we traveled a few hours South instead of East, you’d have seen entire towns with people living their lives.”
At that, she raised her brows. It was hard to keep his eyes on the road when there was a beautiful woman beside him, being uncharacteristically companionable. “Is that true?”
He grunted. “Of course. The UNR may have had the entire country at one time, but the Fall destroyed all that. The land is too large, with far too many people and terrains, places to hide out.” It felt odd talking as much as he was with anyone besides his brothers, but he kept going anyway, loving the way Anna leaned into his words. “Almost the entire middle of the country is farmable land, a lot of it off the grid before the grid even went off. The people there continued on with their lives as normal, and the UNR couldn’t touch them.”
“I knew that the Seventeenth District,” the one that the Resistance now called home, “was very important to them. They always said it was like the string connecting the two Strongholds and keeping the country together.”
Hayden snorted. “For appearance’s sake only. The center of the country has been free for decades.” That was where Hunter’s father had taken him, raised him, trained him. He’d met Sawyer’s mom out there, and the families quickly became friends. More and more people came together, unknowingly parenting the future fighters of the Resistance.
That was why one of Hunter’s first missions he’d sent Hayden on involved arming those living along the border. Ensuring that the UNR never even attempted to venture into Free America.
He was proud to say that they were armed to the teeth, perhaps more armed than Hayden himself. The first step in redemption, the first step in making sure nobody else was hurt because of his past recklessness or poisonous patriarch.
