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“You’re hurt.”
“I’m fine.”
“You have stitches.”
“It’s hardly the first time.” I wanted to remind him that a few months earlier I’d had a collapsed lung, so by contrast this was basically no worse than a skinned knee, but perhaps that wasn’t the best tactic. I’m not dead, but remember that other time I almost died? Yeah, maybe not so much.
“What were you thinking?”
“What was I…? What are you talking about?” For the first time since I came in, I noticed that his eyes were almost black, and a cloud of anger hung around him. He was pissed, I just couldn’t figure out why he was pissed at me.
“You could have been killed.”
“I wasn’t.” I still didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Sunny told me what you did. How you jumped in front of her.”
Hold up. He was mad at me because I’d protected my sister? Um, no, sir, step off that high horse.
“I don’t remember any of it.”
“Stupid.”
This rankled me further, and I tried to pull myself up taller to make myself more physically imposing. I wanted to do anything that might help him realize he was talking like a crazy person. An asshole crazy person.
“You could have died,” he reminded me.
“So could she. Which of those options do you think would have bothered me more?”
He ran his hands through his hair and paced the area in front of me with barely contained aggression. I imagined he wanted to punch a wall really badly right then. His whole body seemed to shimmer with anger.
This, by extension, made me angry as well. Who did he think he was getting mad at me for protecting Sunny? “You tell me what you would have done?” I snapped. “Someone you love is in danger, and you’re standing right there, and it’s in your power to do something. I don’t think you’d just stand idly by and watch them get hurt.” I poked my finger into his chest fairly hard on this last line.
“I don’t know what I’d do, because I wasn’t there. And the person I would want to save decided to jump in front of the godsdamned blast.” His stare was so icy and intense I almost missed the words he was saying.
When my brain caught up and finally understood what he was so mad about, I made a little Oh sound.
The idiot wasn’t mad at me, not really. He was mad at himself because he hadn’t been there to protect me. It was sweet, in a chauvinistic kind of way.
“I’m fine,” I whispered.
His expression fell then, all the rage evaporating, replaced with an anguish so deep it made my soul hurt. “What if you hadn’t been, Tallulah? What if something had happened to you? What if…?”
There were so many what ifs he could end that sentence with, and I saw in his expression he’d spent the last several hours imagining each and every one of them.
Forty-seven missed calls. That was what Sunny had said. He’d called my phone almost fifty times after the explosion before he found out I was okay.
I tried to imagine what each of those unanswered calls had done to him, and I couldn’t stomach it.
“I’m fine,” I said again.
Cade grabbed me by both arms and dragged me against him, clinging to me in the fiercest hug imaginable. Every strain and bruise on my body protested being touched, but in spite of my own discomfort I could sense how badly he needed to hold me right then.
Then I understood how badly I needed it.
I wrapped my arms around his neck, squeezing. I breathed in his scent, that clean, masculine aroma that brought memories of our shared nights on the road flooding back. His arms were muscular and warm, and his body fit so perfectly against mine I thought we might have become one person. Burying my face in his neck, I placed a soft, gentle kiss at the base of his jaw.
We were undone by that one kiss.
