This time, Paige didn’t protest when Jace picked her up and put her in the truck. He could see the fatigue like it was spelled on her face, because to him, it was. And as they got closer to Lily’s house, he could see the dread, too. She could try to hide it, but she couldn’t hide from him.
He stopped by the cabin first, said, “Stay there,” did a lightning job of packing an overnight bag, and came out within three minutes. At her house, he left her in the truck and left the truck in the driveway. She protested, but he gave her a look, and she shut up. After that, he went through the threat-assessment routine with Tobias. When he was sure it was clear, he went back for Paige.
“All good,” he said. “At both places. Which is interesting.”
“Of course,” she said, “we’ve got alarms and cameras now. But I agree, it’s significant. Maybe it’s over. Maybe you’ve lost your stalker, too, although I’m not so sure about that. Surely she knew all that already. That’s kind of the point of a stalker.”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow.” He didn’t bother lifting her down this time. He just carried her straight up to the house. She made a token comment to let him know she was tough, and then she let him take her all the way up the stairs to bed.
When he’d set her gently down against Lily’s pillows, she sighed and said, “You’re pretty good, you know that? I keep wanting to say something like, ‘Why are you doing this? Why would you out yourself like that to the whole town, when I’ll bet it’s the last thing you wanted to do?’ And then I don’t say it, and I know why.”
He sat down beside her, picked up her good hand, and kissed it. It was the second time he’d done that, and apparently it got easier with practice. “Yeah,” he said, “I know why, too. Why you don’t say it, and why I did it. If you don’t want to say it, then don’t. You could call it a day instead, and tell yourself that I’ve got this.”
“Lily,” she said. “Midnight.”
“Got the alarm set for Lily, and I know what she looks like, too.”
She smiled. It hurt, and she still did it. And his heart turned over one more time. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for my sister, and thank you for me. And it’s, I don’t know, a few hours until you have to head down there?”
“Yeah.” His heart had picked up the pace like something was coming. Good or bad. He thought it might be good.
“Then could I… could you…” She stopped.
“You can say it,” he said. “You can ask it.”
She sighed, and then she gave it up, and was there anything like the feeling when a woman did that for you? “Could you lie down with me, maybe sleep with me until then? You’ve got things to do, and I know it. A job that you’re not doing, because you’ve spent a couple days now solving my problems. And I’m asking anyway.”
“You can ask.” He had things to do, yeah. But nothing more important than watching her head into the bathroom and come out again with her makeup washed off, a pale-green towel wrapped around her torso, her hair a little messy from the humidity, and her skin glowing faintly pink from the heat. Her arm was bruised, and so was her face. She had a limp. And she was beautiful.
She went into the dressing room and brought out a long white nightdress, and he said, “That’s the one you wore the other night, I’m thinking. When you came back to bed, and I was sorry not to feel your skin against mine anymore. You did that because you didn’t want me to see you once the lights came on.”
She stopped where she was, in the middle of the floor. He could see her throat move as she swallowed. “You’d have known I wasn’t Lily. Besides, even if I weren’t trying to be somebody else… it’s my leg. It’s ugly.”
“But you see,” he said, “I don’t want somebody else. And as we’re doing each other a favor tonight, telling each other the truth… I know Lily must have prettier nightdresses than that, and I’d like to see one of them on you.”
Her head came up. Her face wasn’t just naked of makeup. It was naked of everything. It was all Paige. “I’m all out of energy tonight. I don’t have…” He thought there might be some tears there, but she was still holding them back. “And the scars.”
“I’ve got a few scars myself. You’ve seen a couple of them, and anytime you want to take a full inventory, I’m happy to help you do it. And I know you’re tired, baby. I want to look at you, that’s all. I want to hold you. I want to know you trust me enough to let me do it.”
She turned around, and he may have been holding his breath until she came back a minute later holding something chocolate-brown. She said, “Pink’s a bridge too far.” And then she dropped the towel right there beside the bed.
Her forearm and shoulder were turning purple. They matched the livid, puckered scar on the front of her thigh.
She looked wounded. She looked strong. She looked like a warrior.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “So you know.”
There was that sheen of tears again, and this time, one of them escaped and made its slow way down her cheek. He bent and kissed it away, and felt her indrawn breath against him, the convulsive heave that was a sob trying to make it out. She stepped back and started to pull the nightgown over her head. It hurt, so he helped her. Gentle over her aching arm, smoothing the silky fabric over her body, looking at creamy lace and tiny buttons over her breasts, and chocolate-brown satin falling to the middle of her muscular thighs.
He pulled the sheet back, and she crawled inside, arranged herself carefully on her back, sighed, and said, “Before you ask—yes, I took another pill. And you make me feel some way… some way I never have, so I’m going to say this now. I know it’s way too soon to be so crazy about you, but I am anyway. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t help it.”
He laughed. Gently, but her eyes, which had drifted closed, opened again. He said, “That’s quite the bold declaration, baby. But we’ll take it one step at a time, hey.”
Her eyes closed again as his hand reached under the silk of that gown and began to work on her thigh. Maybe to hear her sigh again, and maybe to ease that coiled spring inside himself. You did what you could, and just now, this was what he could do. She said, “That was good for me. That was out there on a limb. And nobody’s ever called me ‘baby’. Not even my mother.”
“You call Lily that.”
“But it’s not me.”
He kissed her forehead, but kept his hand working the muscles that had tensed again under the burden of her pain. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “It is. Everybody gets to be somebody’s baby sometimes. Seems you were meant to be mine.”
When he was winding his way down through the foothills to Kalispell, the night drawing in around the truck, the headlights showing him the way, he thought a few things.
First thing. Tobias is with her. The alarm’s set, and if it’s tripped, it doesn’t just go to the cops. It goes to me, too. He trusted his reaction time, and he’d bet he could trust Paige’s. But he trusted Tobias’s more than either one.
Second thing. You’re in too deep, mate. The water was closing in over his head, and he was going down fast. Tonight being a sterling example. Drifting off to sleep with her thigh under his hand, his thumb resting in the indentation that was proof of her courage and her determination, hearing her soft breathing and the trust in the body that curled toward him in sleep. Thinking about a woman crawling toward her fallen partner, leaving her blood on the pavement, intent only on getting him to safety. A woman ignoring her own wounds, her own pain, telling that man that she had him, and that she’d stay.
A woman, her badge and her service weapon locked in a drawer, banished from the job she’d sacrificed so much for, feeling every bit of her failure, deciding that the most important thing to do now was to help her sister, no matter what it cost her.
A woman with every bit of strength he’d ever fostered in himself. He knew exactly what that journey looked like, because he’d taken every step of it himself. People called it “the hard way,” but they didn’t know. They couldn’t see that every piece of it was born of weakness and pain, and the struggle to overcome it.
You built a muscle by tearing it into a thousand tiny places first and letting it heal stronger, and you built courage in exactly the same way. Every fight left its mark, like an oyster forming a pearl one hard-earned layer at a time. Until it was strong. Until it was beautiful.
As for what he was doing now? Putting himself and his battle-weary heart on the line one more time, knowing that this could be the hardest blow he’d taken yet?
That was the other problem. When you were built this way, you had no choice.