I was dressed in skinny jeans, borrowed from Mira, and a tank top. Mira had piled my hair on top of my head in a messy bun and gave me cowboy boots to wear. I was sitting at the reception desk of the ranch’s main entrance, tapping my fingers over and over on the shiny surface of the desk.

“Can I get you anything?” A woman with sleek black hair asked me, worry etched in her face. Her name was Rosa, and she ran the ranch.

I shook my head. “I’m fine. Just go. He’ll be more likely to come around if I’m all alone.”

Rosa looked like she was going to be sick. She had dark circles under her eyes, and her hands had been wringing a small towel over and over for the last ten minutes. “Holler if you need something,” she said before leaving, shutting off the lights of the kitchen and hall on her way down the hall.

I was now completely alone in the office. The only lights were the small sconces on the walls and the light for the porch. I sat back in the chair and looked around the office, trying to find something to pass the time.

There was nothing around the office that indicated what the previous girl¸ the one I was temporarily replacing, looked like. All I knew was what Mira had told me: we had similar builds and hair color. She had different skin coloring than I did and her eyes were not blue. She also didn’t have a large scar on her face. I’d been instructed to keep the left side of my face turned away from the door, to make him think I was really this girl.

I grabbed a book from the bookshelves by the door and settled into the chair behind the desk.

An hour later, there was no activity. It was completely dark outside by now and also completely silent. I waited a bit longer, but I was growing restless. I left the book on the desk and walked to the door, looking out. I couldn’t see Mira or Everett, but I knew they were out there somewhere. As uneasy as Everett was with this, he wasn’t going to let me go this alone. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. That was my feeling for Everett in general: unsure. There was no doubt that he did make me feel a wider range of emotions than I usually felt, but I couldn’t process how I felt about them.

I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I almost missed the glint coming from the opposite direction of the cabins. Whatever it was had caught the light of the moon and reflected it back, causing a small glint of light to flicker towards the door of the main entrance. I stepped out on to the porch, trying to get a better look at the glint. Whatever it was, it was near the entrance to the ranch. I squinted but couldn’t see it well in the dark. So I took a couple steps down the steps to the gravel.

And that’s when the floodlights came on, illuminating not only me. I heard the crunch of gravel and looked at my feet. But the sound didn’t come from me.

My eyes shot up, seeing the man crouched behind a vehicle in the driveway, staring at me with black eyes, edging closer. Instantly, I turned my left cheek, to keep it from his view. And that was when he started to run.

Fuck, I thought in my head. My body froze, a small voice screaming in my head. And then I turned and started running as I’d been instructed to-towards the last cabin. My delay in turning had resulted in a significant lead for him and as I sprinted, I could hear his grunts. I could see his shadow on the gravel right behind mine.

My heart beat double time in my chest and I felt fear, true, crippling fear. And then I remembered, knew Everett was there in the darkness. I felt relief. So I pushed harder. Seconds after my steps left the gravel, the sounds of crunching gravel dying, his did as well. Now all I could hear was his grunts and the blood roaring in my head. We were out of the floodlight at this point, in complete darkness.

And that was when I felt my legs being kicked, knocking me to the ground. Instantly, I recovered, rolling on my back and frantically crawling backwards as he approached. I couldn’t make out his features in the pitch black of the night. My eyes were still adjusting, so I squinted, trying to see his face as I scrambled away from him.

All I saw was dark hair, shadowed skin, and clothing that was all black. He leaned for me with a hand and I kicked blindly, feeling my foot gain purchase on his hand. Unfortunately, his other hand grabbed my ankle and tugged. Fear gripped my throat, making me unable to form words. My hand reached into the pocket for the knife Mira had given me.

A moment later, there was a blur. I heard a grunt, and then the sickening thuds of someone being punched repeatedly. My heartbeat was still racing when I jumped to my feet and moved to the commotion. I knew instantly it was Everett, could make out his body on top of the other mans, his fists pummeling his face. And then Everett’s hand was on the man’s throat. “Don’t fucking move,” he growled.

I put the knife back in my pocket and looked around, seeing Mira standing nearby with her hand on the gun on her hip. The other man, the man that Six had hired to hang around, was helping Everett up.

Mira walked to me. “You need to get out of here,” she said in a low voice.

I nodded and walked to Everett, who was standing feet away from the man he’d subdued. Everett was breathing hard, trembling. I put a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

“Cora.” The voice came from the man on the ground. I looked at Mira and she shook her head.

“Go,” she mouthed.

“Sit here,” I said, dragging a chair from the table to the bathroom in our hotel room.

Everett looked at me warily from by the window. We’d gotten a hotel room in Denver after I’d stopped at a drugstore to get some bandages for his knuckles. Everett had received just one blow to the face, a cut on his eyebrow, before he got the rest of the hits in. His knuckles were red and swollen, and I worried he’d broken more than one of his fingers.

We hadn’t spoken since leaning the ranch. I’d forced Everett into the passenger seat because he was fuming and then used the GPS to find the closest hotel in the city.

When Everett still hadn’t moved from the window, I walked over to him and gripped his arm in my hand. “Don’t be a baby.”

Everett yanked his arm from my hand but still followed me to the chair. I held a hand out for his and looked up to his face. Blood from the cut on his eyebrow was slowly trickling down his face. I knew head wounds often bled more than wounds on other parts of the body, but it still unnerved me a bit to see blood trickling down with some dried blood hanging on the side of his face. That could wait, I’d decided. His hands needed to be looked at.

I crouched in front of him and looked over his hands. All the self-defense training I’d done with Mira had given me a lot of bloody, bruised knuckles, so I knew a little bit about how to treat them. I looked closely at the knuckles on his middle fingers especially, as they’d taken the brunt of the beating.

“Bend your fingers.”

Everett didn’t. I looked up at him from my position crouched on the floor in front of him. “Bend them,” I said again, one eyebrow raised. I felt him bend them, though I could tell it was uncomfortable. “Good.” I flipped his hands over and set them, palms up, on the tops of his thighs. I ran my fingers over them, from tip to base, making sure they felt fine. Nothing seemed to be dislocated or broken. “I think you’re going to be okay, but you’ll need to ice them and take something for the swelling.”

Holding his hands, I pulled him to standing and led him to the sink. “Let’s wash the dried blood off so I can bandage them.” He remained silent. I looked up in the mirror over the sink as I washed his hands, and met his eyes. He was looking at me with such intensity in his eyes that his silence spoke volumes. I swallowed and looked down at his hands again, finishing up washing them.

I gestured for him to sit in the chair again and then carefully patted his hands dry with a washcloth. “You probably don’t need this, but I don’t want to hear you whining because your hands hurt and are infected,” I said, opening up the package of bacitracin.

His silence was getting to me. For someone who spent so much time in the silence, I was baffled why it bothered me so much now. But it did. So I kept making little comments, trying to get a rise out of him.

He didn’t flinch as I applied the cream to his knuckles. Some of the knuckles had their skin ripped off from the repeated blows Everett had delivered to the other man. I applied band-aids to the knuckles that were especially torn up and then wet a washcloth. “Your knuckles don’t look too bad, but your face looks pretty rough.”

Still silence. I gritted my teeth and warmed the washcloth with the water. As I wrung out the excess water, I looked at him in the mirror. He was still watching me, his eyes on mine. I couldn’t read what his body language was saying, but his eyes were smoldering. With anger, with lust? I wasn’t sure. I turned back to face him and applied the wash cloth to the dried blood on his cheek first. With one hand, I pushed back his hair to clean the blood along the blood along his hairline. My hand gripped a bit in his hair, my fingers feeling the silkiness of his strands.

The room got smaller and the walls moved in while I cleaned his face. I tried to focus my thoughts away from my attraction to him. But I couldn’t. Lust was beginning to suffocate me as my fingers played with his hair and my other hand rubbed the washcloth on his skin. I purposefully avoided looking into his eyes and concentrated on cleaning the blood away.

I was close enough that his breath was on my neck, blowing warmth right down to my chest. I swallowed and knew his eyes tracked the movement of my throat. My legs tingled and my blood rushed to the surface of my skin.

I moved the washcloth up his face, slowly rubbing circles into his skin to remove the dried blood. There shouldn’t have been anything erotic about that moment, but with his warm breath on my neck and my hand in his hair while I was inches from his face, I could feel desire all the way in my bones. I blew out a breath on his skin, right over the wetness left on his skin from the washcloth. That seemed to be his undoing, because before I knew it his arms wrapped around me and yanked me onto his lap so I was straddling him. We were face to face, his arms crushing me to him, our breathing mingling in the small space.

But he didn’t kiss me. He didn’t do anything more than hold me tightly to him. So, after blowing out a shaky breath, I continued rubbing the wash cloth, up his temple and into his eyebrow. I was tender when I reached the actual cut and found it had stopped bleeding entirely.

One of my hands went up into his hair that fell on his forehead and I pushed it out of the way, to give me better access to his skin. My eyes immediately found the scar on his forehead.

With the thumb of the hand holding back his hair, I rubbed over the scar a little. Everett’s arms tightened around me and his breathing picked up.

My heart rate was climbing, blood was pounding in my veins. I wasn’t even concentrated on cleaning his wounds anymore, I was trying not to combust, just from his arms around my waist and his breath on my neck. I braved a glance at his eyes and finally, I was able to name what it was I saw there.

Hunger.

We stared at one another for a few moments. Me on his lap, one hand in his hair. His arms wrapped tightly around my waist so that I was straddling him. And then his hands slid from my waist to my neck and pulled my lips down to meet his.

I closed my eyes upon impact. This kiss was different than every other kiss. It was like gulping that last breath of air before diving deep, as if it would be the last time you’d ever breathe again. I certainly felt like I was drowning.

His lips were hard on mine, almost punishing, before his hands tugged the ponytail out of my hair, sending my hair falling around us. He wrapped his hand around my hair and pulled, forcing me to raise my chin and expose my neck.

And then he was kissing down the column of my neck, from my jaw to my collarbone. Slowly, but torturously. My chest heaved with exertion and my eyes refused to open. While he kept one hand in my hair, the other moved around my waist to my ribcage, squeezing. My breathing was so ragged at this point that I wanted him to reach in and spread my ribcage apart, to free my lungs from their confines.

“Stand up,” he said against my neck. I did, albeit on shaky legs. And then Everett lunged for me again, pushing me against the counter at my back as his lips met mine over and over.

Clothes were being pulled off of us like they unwanted obstacles they were, thrown on the floor in a heap. Everett whipped me around so I was facing myself in the mirror as he yanked me free of my underwear. I could do nothing but stare at our reflection, see him staring at my back. He made a sound deep in his throat as I felt his hand touch the top of my shoulder blade. “Exquisite,” he said while running his hand down the center of my back, right over my spine. When he reached my tailbone, his hands grasped my hips and a second later he was inside of me.

It happened so fast that I threw my head back in a moan. Everett stilled. “Look,” he said. “Look in the mirror.”

I couldn’t. It was too much. But Everett was bossy.

“Look. Look at yourself in the mirror, Parker.”

With great struggle, I pulled my head down and opened one eye, my entire body overcome with the lust he brought out in me. The first thing I saw was our skin – moreover the difference in color. I was pale, he was deeply tanned. I ran my eyes up my body, which took center stage in the mirror, until I saw his face reflected back at me. His eyes were narrow, the ice blue of them lit up. Blue was suddenly the warmest color I’d ever known.

“Keep looking,” he said as he thrust again. I had to fight my body’s instinct to close my eyes. “Look,” he said again, thrusting again. He kept up a rhythm, slowly increasing his speed, until my eyes involuntarily closed.

“Open them, Parker. I want you to see this.” I moaned but did as he said. He started again, slower this time. Excruciatingly slow. “If you close them again, I’ll start over.”

“Arrrgh,” I moaned from my throat, totally overcome with so many feelings. I couldn’t process them. The resounding one was desire-that was obvious. But there was more. It was in the way he was staring back at me, his eyes completely on my face in the mirror. It was how his hands were holding me, lifting me. He wasn’t just touching me. He was holding me. That was more. And most of all, it was the way I was looking at him, something I couldn’t, wouldn’t define. It was too much, frighteningly so.

His pace picked up and I was gripping onto the counter with white knuckles, my shoulders hunched as my body started rapidly ascending.

“Look, Parker. Look,” his voice demanded.

I didn’t realize I’d closed my eyes again, so I forced them open and watched, watched the moment we were both overtaken.

I fell onto the counter then, completely, utterly spent. I felt Everett pick me up and then carry me to the bed. As I fell asleep, I heard him whisper something along my neck, but I was too far gone to know what he said.

I awoke in the dark to the sound of moaning. It wasn’t a moan of desire, but rather of fear. I flipped over in the bed, seeing Everett writhing and soaked in sweat.

“Wake up,” I said. When he didn’t, I tentatively put my hand on his chest and pushed. “Wake up, Everett,” I said louder this time.

Everett thrashed harder, tangling the sheets all over the bed. I sat up.

“Everett!” I yelled. “Wake up!” I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him until his eyes opened and he was staring at me.

“Everett,” I said, softer than before. “It was just a bad dream.”

Everett coughed and rolled away, sitting on the side of the bed with his back to me. I watched him put his face in his hands and rub away the sweat. “Sorry,” he said gruffly before standing up and walking into the bathroom. He closed the door behind him, leaving me in the darkness alone.

I looked at the door, heard the shower turn on, and then looked at the clock beside the bed. 3:00 AM.

3:00 AM was a terrible time of day. It was too late to go to sleep if you had to be awake at a reasonable hour and too early to stay awake for the rest of the day. Even then, I wasn’t sure that I could go to sleep.

I laid back in the pillows. My hand reached over and felt the wetness of Everett’s pillowcase, so I grabbed it, intending to replace it with one of the spare pillows. Instead, I uncovered Everett’s journal.

I looked at it for a minute, lit only barely by the light from the moon outside our window. And then I looked at the bathroom door.

I told myself it was none of my business, to let Everett have his privacy. I told myself I’d be pissed if he invaded mine any more than he already had.

But my hands ignored the reasoning in my brain and reached for it anyway.

I kept my hand on the cover, running my fingers over the cloth-like material. And then I flipped it open to the first page.

I knew right away it was a drawing of me. My head was thrown back, my neck was exposed and my arms were wrapped around myself. My lips were partially open but my eyes were closed. It was sensual, and very intimate.

What stood out the most was the scar he’d drawn along my cheekbone. It was drawn exactly the same as my own scar. My fingers touched the drawing. Was this how he saw me? The girl he’d drawn looked sad. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t anything, except annoyed. But, I wasn’t annoyed at this photo. This photo made me feel the way the artist himself made me feel: confused. He’d written words around the drawing, but I was far too uncomfortable with the drawing to focus on them.

Deciding not to continue looking at the journal, I closed the lid and pushed it back to its spot and replaced his pillow with a fresh one from the closet.

The water turned off in the bathroom, so I rolled onto my side, my back to the bathroom door. I heard Everett come out and cough again. I made no move to acknowledge him, still processing my feelings.

The bed dipped and heard him slide in. And then there was silence. I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to come to me, to cuddle me from behind, but I couldn’t deny the small ache I felt now that he’d put separation between us.