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But then my reason won out every time, and I schooled myself into a picture of patience. She needed time. She needed some distance to sort through how she felt, and being a domineering ass wasn’t going to help her feel less trapped by her situation.
Thunder cracked again, and I looked over at the clock on my bedside table. It was out. Frowning, I picked up my phone, and even though it had had a thirty percent charge when I’d plugged it in last night, it was dead now. The power must have been out for a while, then.
With a groan, I hefted myself out of bed. Coffee and candles it was, then. It didn’t matter what time it was—I was up. I dragged myself to the bathroom where I brushed my teeth in the dark and swiped on some deodorant before scrounging through my dresser for a pair of trainer pants and a T-shirt.
The analog clock in my kitchen showed four AM. Great. I plugged my phone into a travel charger I had in my bag on the granite island, and while I waited for it to juice up, I rummaged around my pantry for a protein bar. I peered at what I had chosen in the darkness. Chocolate mint. At least it wouldn’t clash with my toothpaste.
My phone lit up on the counter and immediately dinged with several notifications. With the power out, I had no doubt that Clemens would want me to drag my tired ass back to his ER. For once, I was torn. I needed sleep. But I also needed to forget a dramatically tilted pair of dark blue eyes, and work was the best way to do that.
Then, I sucked in a breath, staring at my phone.Laurel’s phone. With the power out, her alarms wouldn’t go off.
I tossed the protein bar onto the counter, grabbed my phone attached to its charger, and skidded into my room to grab my key fob before jamming my feet into my sneakers and nearly running to my car. Rain pounded on the garage roof in tempo with my pulse.I hope I’m wrong, I thought as I started the pickup and punched the garage door button.I hope her phone stayed charged and she’s okay. I hope I show up and she tells me off.
Okay, maybe I didn’t exactly hope that last part, but if her telling me off meant that she had been sleeping soundly before I pounded on her door, then so be it. I pushed the line between safe driving in the rain and booking it down the two-lane highway and into town where her apartment had been built right off the main street.
I parked the truck next to my SUV, and ignoring the torrential downpour and darkened streetlamps, I jogged through the biting rain to her apartment. It was one of those apartment complexes with a stairwell between two ends of the building with apartments on either side of each landing.
Breathing hard, I paused outside her front door. The stairwell above my head provided some cover from the icy storm, but behind me, the water cascaded off the concrete like a manic fountain.
Was this stupid? Was I going to piss her off—or worse, push her away even further?
But then the image of Laurel curled in a ball and gasping for air, sobbing and alone in the dark permeated my thoughts.Fuck that.
I tried her door handle, and it opened easily, unlocked. “Laurel,” I growled under my breath. I made a mental note to get her a digital keypad lock the next time I went to the hardware store. She might be less likely to forget about locking it. The door opened with a quiet squeak, and I poked my head in, still breathing heavily through my nose.
Humid and silent, her living room had the air of a cozy cabin before the scary axe murderer scene in a horror flick. Only, I was the intruder. I closed the door behind me, trying to let my eyes adjust to the dimness, and my ear tilted to the side, listening for the evidence of Laurel’s nightmares.
A soft snore rolled through the heavy silence.
Smothering a laugh, I pulled my phone from my pocket and tapped the screen to illuminate the space dimly. Laurel lay on her couch with her head on the worn arm and one leg cocked up on the back of the faded pleather. One arm had been draped over her bare stomach between her hiked-up, enormous, white T-shirt and a pair of oversized sweats that she had rolled down her hips to keep them up. Around her, file folders, scattered papers, and stacks of tidy notebooks littered the living room. She had a laptop closed on the coffee table and what looked like a collective gallon of sugary, canned iced coffee drinks littered everywhere.
I released a breath, tilting my head back to suck in air gratefully. She was okay. For whatever reason, her nightmare hadn’t gripped her yet, and I sent up a silent prayer of thanks for that. It would have ripped my heart in half to see her like that again, all alone.
Laurel’s soft snore stopped suddenly, and she shifted, breathed in deeply, and then let out a little sound that plucked at my heartstrings.I should leave. I should lock the door, back out, and let her sleep. But…
I took a tentative step forward, scanning her living room for her phone. If I just assured myself that her insane ritual of keeping herself from going into REM sleep was still doable, then I could leave her and at least feel confident that she wouldn’t dissolve into her nightmares. But I didn’t see her phone anywhere.
Laurel let out another sound, and it sounded distinctly worried. She huffed, curling onto her side and bringing her hands up to her chest. There was no way I could just leave her like that. She didn’t even have a blanket, dammit. And what was she doing, here? Did she suddenly take up novel writing or something?
Honestly, she probably could write a novel about everything she’d been through. People would read that shit.
I crouched down next to her, between the coffee table and the couch, and tried to be stealthy as I shuffled papers around, looking for her phone. If she woke up, I was going to scare the daylights out of her.
Laurel moaned again, more distressed, and her breathing started to pick up. That was enough evidence for me. I sat on the couch so her curled up shins were against my hip, and I rubbed her arm. “Laurel. Hey, wake up, sweetie.”
She puffed out a distressed breath, and it caught like she might cry.
I abandoned the gentle approach, which hadn’t worked last time, either. Instead, I snaked an arm under her torso and lifted her onto my lap. She was freezing, her skin taut and cold. As I gathered her in my arms, I roughly jostled her. “Laurel, wake up.”
She woke with a loud intake of breath. Her lungs worked under my arms, and I could feel, rather than see, her confusion. “What? Where?”
“You’re still home,” I assured her. “You’re safe.”
“Lach?” I had expected her voice to be confused, scared, maybe even accusatory. But unless I was absolutely insane, I could have sworn I heard a touch of relief in the way she gusted out my name.
“Yeah, sorry,” I said, my voice husky from not using it yet today. “I may have… snuck into your house. I saw the power was out and I was worried about your alarms.”
Laurel looked around, sitting up slightly. “You snuck in? How?”
