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I held my hands up, palms out in a placating gesture. “You were having a nightmare,” I explained as he blinked rapidly. “It sounded bad.”
“Fuck,” he hissed, drawing his knees up and cradling his head in his hands. “You heard it from all the way across the house?”
Given the muted lighting, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but something that resembled shame flashed across his features and made my heart pinch.
“I’m a light sleeper,” I said, wanting to make that look go away. It wasn’t a lie, after all. Years of training had made me such a light sleeper it didn’t take much to wake me up. “Things that most people sleep through wake me up.” He didn’t look like he believed me, so I tried harder. “If someone had sneezed that would have done the trick. Promise.”
I wasn’t sure if he bought it, but he let out a sigh and turned his face away, rubbing the skepticism off roughly with the palms of his hands.
“Sorry for waking you up. Go on back to bed.”
I hesitated, unsure if I should leave him after what I’d just witnessed. I was no stranger to nightmares myself, but what he’d just suffered through wasbad. “Are—are you sure? I could—”
“Go back to bed,” he repeated, his tone much more severe that time and leaving no room for argument.
It went against my nature to walk away from a person in pain, and a voice in the back of my head was screaming at me that the man I’d just seen at his most vulnerable wasnotokay, but I forced myself to turn on my heel and exit the room.
“Close the door behind you, would you?” he asked just as I cleared the threshold, his voice now sounding broken down and defeated. The bridge of my nose tingled and the backs of my eyes stung, my sensitive heart clenching at the sound of it.
I wasn’t sure what this man had gone through, but whatever had happened was still weighing heavily on his shoulders.
All I could think as the door snicked shut was that the thunderclouds I’d seen in his eyes made so much more sense.
Chapter
Fourteen
DEVA
My belly feltlike I’d just swallowed an entire can of soda in less than a minute, the bubbles fizzing and popping wildly as I approached Myra and Bennett’s house. My first week of nanny-ing was complete. It was my first day off, and I’d been summoned to the Montgomery’s forfamily dinner.
I was excited and nervous at the same time. Sure, I’d met Jase and Cannon already, but the circumstances of that first meeting were... less than ideal. Tonight, I was meeting the rest of Myra and Bennett’s little family, and I wanted so desperately to fit in with these people that anxiety was crawling beneath my skin like a million little ants.
I was twenty-six years old, for crying out loud, and not a single day in all those years had I fit in anywhere. I didn’t belong with my father, he’d made that abundantly clear by dumping me off on the Oakes’s with that hideous agreement of marrying me off to their son. I didn’t belong with them either, something that Agnes especially made a point of reminding me of on a daily basis. I didn’t fit in with the Fellowship, always questioning their teachings and making me the quintessential black sheep.
More than anything, I wanted to fit into the tiny town of Redemption. I loved it here. I loved that you could walk down Main Street and peer through the windows of a dozen shops, each selling something different but no less interesting.
I loved that people passing on the sidewalks waved or tipped their chin to you, offering a friendly smile whether or not they knew you. I’d grown up being told the people in town were evil, they were sinners damned to spend eternity suffering. How very wrong and closed-minded the so-called Enlightened were.
I wanted to try out the yoga studio and have breakfast at the diner. I wanted to have another delicious coffee from Hot Java. I wanted this to be my home. And dinner at Myra’s tonight felt like the true start of that, because these people were ingrained in this town. They were a part of its fabric. They fit in perfectly; I hoped I could do the same.
The sun was lowering over the mountains, the sky changing colors with its descent, as I climbed the porch steps to the front door and knocked.
It flew open seconds later, Myra’s smiling face greeting me like a warm, comforting blanket. “No need for any of that knocking business, sweetheart. You just come on in whenever the mood strikes you.”
I returned her smile with one of my own, the dimples pressing deep into my cheeks as she took my hand and all but yanked me across the threshold. I leaned in with a giggle to press a kiss to her cheek as she wrapped me in a tight, motherly hug.
“It’s so good to see you, honey,” she said enthusiastically once we broke apart. “Just look at you, pretty as a picture.”
“Jeez, My. Let her inside already, why don’t you?” Bennett’s ragged voice rumbled, his voice full of humor at his wife’s exuberance. “You act like you haven’t seen the poor girl in a lifetime.”
She cut her eyes over her shoulder at her husband, and I didn’t bother to hide my laughter when he returned her glare with a wry wink.
“A week is a long time. Especially when she’d been at her new job.”
“You’ve texted with her every single day,” he countered, his words ringing true. Each morning I woke up to a text from Myra wishing me a good day, and every evening I got another asking how my day went. Personally, I loved when my phone chimed with her incoming messages. I’d never had a person in my life care about me the way Myra did, and it was a feeling that warmed me from the inside out.
“I don’t mind,” I assured her and Bennett both. “If she didn’t text me, I’d probably just text her.”
