by Violet Duke
Caine was no longer sure whether to punch him or be impressed by him.
And he said so out loud.
Addison came over with a sympathetic smile, “Yeah…Alec has that effect on people.”
Bowing proudly like he’d just been crowned ass-of-the-year, he linked his arm through Georgia’s and made a grand pageant-worthy exit processional, complete with a whole elbow-elbow-wrist-wrist Miss America wave as he passed rows of residents who looked thoroughly used to this bats in the belfry behavior.
Kevin and Millie gleefully joined in with two-handed waves at the chuckling spectators while Georgia alternated between gaping at Alec and glaring daggers at Caine.
Caine tugged at his collar. “She’s going to kill me, isn’t she?”
Addison nodded solemnly. “I’d get my affairs in order if I were you.”
After the foursome disappeared around the corner, Addison shuffled her steel-toe stilettos and gave him an awkward smile. “You don’t actually have to stay. I can break down the sewing classroom on my own.”
Did her stubborn independence used to turn him on before? Because it sure as hell did now. Reaching up to slide a stray metallic silver and blue lock of hair out of her face, he murmured in a deep, rumbling rasp, “I want to stay.”
The instant burst of shy heat in her eyes had him exhaling roughly, and admitting gruffly, “Because frankly, I’m not sure how much longer I can keep away from you, sweetheart.”
His words hit her square in the chest. Then took her on a dangerous rush where pure, unfiltered hope filled her veins like a drug.
For the first time in her life, Addison understood why her mom used to OD on this feeling as much as she did heroin, why she used to chase it the same way she used to chase a high.
In her mom’s case, the men offering her the hope of a future worth dreaming about did so irresponsibly, with no real intention of following through.
Caine would follow-through.
Or kill himself trying.
Lately, she’d been thinking about that constantly.
She’d overheard Georgia and Alec talking the other week about how Caine didn’t do much else besides working and tracking David down. And how David was apparently involved with folks in the illegal drug trades in Mexico now.
With David’s background in pharmaceutics—and lack of any morality issues when it came to drugging innocent people—the news wasn’t all that groundbreaking.
But the newly realized fear that David was now connected to dangerous people who could hurt Caine? That scared her more than all of her nightmares of David over the years combined.
Before she managed to shake herself out of her thoughts, they’d already walked over to the closed meeting space they used for Georgia’s class. In total silence.
He stopped with his hand on the doorknob and studied her for a bit, with those deep, stormy eyes of his that always saw too much, read her too well. Then, he quietly pushed open the door to the darkened room and walked in.
But he made no move to flick on the light switch.
Instead, he simply stood there, just inside the doorway, holding the door open for her silently, waiting for her to decide if she wanted to go into the pitch-blackness with him.
She knew the choice to step over that threshold, into the unknown, was symbolic of so much more than what he was asking in that moment…a fact she was certain hadn’t escaped him.
He didn’t back down. But he didn’t push, either.
“Alec thinks there’s no way you and I can be friends,” she whispered, in a feeble attempt to keep them away from a ledge they’d be tempted to jump off of, where there would be no coming back from. “This is sort of an experiment he’s conducting to prove his hypothesis.”
“Did I mention I hated that ‘just friends’ idea from the start?”
Yeah. Her too.
“You want to know what I was thinking about when you suggested it?” he continued, reaching up to put his forearm against the door jamb, crowding the opening with his broad, six-foot frame.
She shouldn’t. No good could possibly come from being allowed inside Caine Spencer’s head. “Yes.”
The gravelly rumble of his voice turned hypnotic. “I was remembering how those soft, sexy sounds you’d make when I’d kiss you on your neck—right where that new tattoo is—would test me, nearly break me of my control every time.”
When his eyes began tracing intently over the lines of her tattoo, the air in her lungs thinned, and slipped past her lips before she could stop it.
His jaw tightened, and his forearms flexed. Once. Twice. Before his voice dropped a full octave lower. “A test. Every. Single. Time.”
Oh God, she wasn’t going to make it.
He took a step back.
She followed him in.
The moment the door clicked shut behind her, he leaned in, very nearly caging her against the wall as he reached for the light switch.
Her mind short-circuited.
That’s when her ever-so-helpful mouth decided to fill in without any oversight from her brain whatsoever. “That tattoo on my neck isn’t real,” she blurted out.
Caine stilled.
She did too. In a don’t-make-any-sudden-movements sort of way.
The light switch remained off.
In the ten seconds it took her frantic eyes to adjust to the continued darkness, she felt him sift his fingers through her hair and bare the side of neck in question. “This tattoo isn’t real?” His lips hovered a few millimeters away from her ear.
“A tattoo artist who used to work in Hollywood makes them. They’re like those kiddie sticker tattoos you transfer on with water, but more durable. They’re the most realistic ones I could afford to buy in bulk, and they last all day, but they make your skin feel different.” She was just babbling now, but couldn’t seem to stop. “That’s why I only chose to put them places where I knew no one was going to touch me.” Jesus, woman, stop talking!
She finally did. But only because Caine was sliding the back of a single calloused finger against her neck, right over her racing pulse point.
“So no one touches you here?”
It sounded like a question, but it felt like a test.
“Only you,” she replied honestly.
A rough male hiss split the air. His forehead came down to rest against hers. “You said you chose places—plural. Are your other tattoos fake, too?
“All but two of them,” she confessed, actually really glad to finally get that off her chest. “The real ones are little. You can’t see them.”
Even though it was too dark for her to confirm, she could feel his eyes blaze in response. “Still throwing down dares, sweets?” His voice was deep, smoky. Nearly unrecognizable.
“Wh— No! I meant you aren’t able to see them, not that you can’t see them.” Ohmigod. “I mean you can’t, of course.” Her cheeks felt like roasted red peppers. “Be-because they’re not in places you can see with my clothes on.”
He groaned.
Oy, if she wasn’t so traumatized over the verbal train wreck that had just spilled out of her mouth, she’d be groaning too. She didn’t even want to imagine where in the world he thought she’d tattooed herself.
All around them, time seemed to have ceased altogether, as if she’d traveled them so far off-course that the future as a whole didn’t know how the heck to proceed.
“New subject.” Coarse and clipped, it was more a final decision than a suggestion.
Oh, bless the kind, kind man.
Dramatic pause button on the world now deactivated, sounds and noises returned. The darkness in the room was lifted, too. Thanks to Caine finally reaching over and flicking the light switch on in the room.
He backed away from her then—albeit reluctantly—eyes scorching her head to toe, as if trying to x-ray the locations of her real tattoos.
But he said not a word.
After every inch of her skin felt thoroughly seared and tingly, he turned and started picking
up sewing machines, taking them to the storage closet while she unglued her feet and began stacking the extra chairs.
“Tell me something,” he said, breaking the silence a few minutes later. “That day I pulled you over. Why did you try and run from me? I know you knew it was me. So why’d you run?”
In so many ways, the man hadn’t changed at all. But in this moment, she saw it. He was just so much…grittier. Deliciously harder. Which all just made it that much more devastating when his expression would soften for just the briefest moment when he’d look at her.
What was it about the man that always made her want to reveal every secret she possessed? “I ran because the second I saw you in your squad car, looking even more ruggedly beautiful than you were in my memories, all I wanted to do was stop the car and go to you.” She drew in a shaky breath as she confessed, “I’d always wondered what I’d do if I saw you one day. If I’d be able to play it cool. Or if I’d be all spy-like and keep on the ruse to maintain my cover. And in that moment when I saw you again, I had my answer.” She shook her head as if still in disbelief. “In that moment, I seriously feared a full-blown jellyfish moment was coming if I didn’t change lanes and get the heck out of there.”
“A jellyfish moment?”
She nodded solemnly. “Yep. Me. Wrapped around you. Like a jellyfish in heat.”
His mouth quirked up into the tiniest motion possible that could still be considered a smile. “Good god, I’ve missed you, woman. We’re going to need to figure this out.”
“This?”
“You. Me. Because even though I know I can’t have them right now, I want them…all your jellyfish moments.”
Her breathing seized and went on strike, not willing to go back to work again in her lungs until he said more words like that.
“Keeping away from you all these years almost killed me. Attempting it for a second time in my life is going to be next to impossible.”
She’d never seen him look so conflicted. “But you’re going to try? To stay away from me?”
“If by try, you mean fail, then sure.”
Geez, the man had his own brand of poetry that never failed to get her knees weak.
When he continued to look at her like she was just out of reach, she had to ask, “You have proof, don’t you? You know that all of this with David isn’t over yet.”
“The same way you do, sweetheart.”
That, she understood. It had never gone away. The feeling of never being quite safe. Free.
“That number I gave you, the one to contact me. Do you still remember it?”
Again with the mind-reading. “Yes.” It was locked in the same memory compartment she kept her social security number. She’d held onto it mainly to keep holding onto him. She hadn’t been fanciful enough to believe—
“I still keep that phone with me 24-7,” he informed her gruffly.
Oh good lord. Another jellyfish moment.
But she held firm to her boundaries. Barely. Partly because of the worry she continued to see in his eyes.
They got back to the task at hand, working in an unhurried, surprisingly easy silence, their gazes colliding every so often as the minutes ticked away. Somehow, the entire experience of just being here with him was almost…therapeutic.
By the time she was locking up the restored meeting room, she felt strangely like she had the one time a minister had found her outside of a church back when she was in high school.
She’d been staring at the historic building, wondering if its powers of salvation would extend to someone like her mother when the old man came up to stand beside her. Neither of them spoke; they just gazed up at the church in silence.
She didn’t get any new answers per se, but she thanked the minister all the same.
That night, she packed her first ‘go-bag,’ and helped Tanner and Kylie pack one as well.
Even now, over a decade later, she still remembered exactly what they’d all packed.
“Two essential items, for every sentimental one,” she’d told them.
She thought about all those items as Caine walked her up to her apartment. When they reached her door, she told him, out of the blue, “About a month after we moved in here, I unpacked my go-bag…for the first time ever.”
His eyes ran over her face like a gentle caress. “I hate that you had to wait seven long years, but I’m glad it was here, sweetheart.”
She pushed open her door and recognized the irony of their reversed situation—this time with her at the threshold and him on the other side.
When she turned to face him, one foot already inside, he shook his head. “Don’t invite me in. Not just yet. Because it’ll take a better man than I’m capable of being right now not to follow.”
Her heart slammed against her ribcage.
They both looked down to watch his fingers twine with hers. His voice was as rough as she’d ever heard it when he asked brought up his own out-of-the-blue topic. “Did you always have a bed? Every night for the past seven years? That’s the first thing I’d wonder every night when it’d get dark out. If you had a bed to sleep on.”
There he went again raiding her heart with that crazy wonderful poetry of his.
“Yes. Always.”
He nodded, then slowly stepped back from the doorway. “You going to be okay? Do you need anything?”
You.
His reaction was swift. She may as well have uttered the word aloud for the pain and hunger that now surrounded him like a storm of lightning and thunder.
“Stop reading my mind,” she whispered.
“No.”
The softly growled word was the only warning she got before his arms snaked around her waist and pulled her to him. “There hasn’t been a single night since you left that I haven’t thought about the way you felt in my arms the first time I’d slept longer than a few hours in years.”
She gasped.
His eyes flared. “That right there—that’s why I’m never going to stop reading your thoughts, baby. No matter how well Alec taught you to hide, knowing that even now, after all this time, you still can’t hide all your feelings from me completely? That’s the one thing that’ll help me sleep tonight. It still won’t be for longer than an hour or two, but at least in that short time, I’ll have something to hold onto again.”
Tidal waves of emotion slammed into her, one after another, crashing through every last barrier she’d built around herself, stripping away every protective layer she’d hid behind for the last seven years. Until all that was left was her.
A low, harsh sound broke free from Caine.
Feelings and thoughts, fears and hopes—she bared it all to him.
For so long, she’d kept everything from everyone, herself included. Now, disarmed and defenseless, anyone with eyes could plainly see the one unmistakably distinguishable part of her that she’d had to work the hardest to hide.
Her heart. Which was still irrevocably tethered to the man standing before her.
“Go inside, Addison. Right now. While I’m still able to let you.”
Every cell in her body rebelled against the command.
“Please, honey. Don’t do that. Don’t flash that look at me. That stubborn rebel-in-stilettos sass will have you under me in your bed in two seconds flat.”
He groaned at whatever her eyes were telling him next.
To be fair, he started it with that panty-melting threat.
“Baby, you’re killing me.”
Right back at you.
He pushed open the door the rest of the way for her, one hand holding the top of the frame as if physically stopping himself from doing anything else.
For a while, the internal battles they each faced with themselves kept them both cemented where they stood.
But eventually, the growing torment and tension racking his entire frame made her back up a single step and clear the doorway.
“Lock the deadbolt.”
These overprotective demands just shouldn
’t be this sexy.
She shut the door and laid her palm against it.
Knowing he was still out there, she confessed quietly to the wooden barricade between them, “That memory stayed with me, too. Even now, the only way I’m able to eventually fall asleep is to imagine your arms around me. Holding me. Keeping me safe.”
Loving me.
It was a full minute before she finally heard his heavy tactical boots walk away.
Chapter Nine
Caine managed to go an entire week before calling her.
“Hello?”
Considering that he’d wanted to break down her door and push her back up against it the last time they’d talked, changing his default setting of gruff and abrupt after hearing her soft, throaty voice again just wasn’t possible.
“Do you have a fancy dress you can wear?”
A startled ‘oh’ came from Addison’s end of the phone line, and he swore he could hear her biting on her lip before she replied, “Sort of. I needed one for an award banquet a few years back so I found a long dressy one at a thrift store that Kylie helped me snazzy up.” A smile filtered into her tone then. “Why? Are you taking me dancing?”
“Do you want me to?” he asked immediately, a hundred percent seriously. “I could. Take you dancing, if you want.”
Addison chuckled gamely. “I don’t know. I might be bad at it. I’ve actually never been.”
He frowned. “What about in high school?”
She gave an audible shrug. “I never went to prom or homecoming or anything like that because I was always watching the kids. My junior and senior year, we were pretty much living in a big crack house so I never let them stay there without me, day or night.”
Dammit, he wanted to throw that criminal mother of hers in jail. “Well what about that award banquet you got the fancy dress for? Wasn’t there dancing there?”
“Toward the end, but I didn’t stay that long. Plus, my feet were a little sore from the strappy heels I’d borrowed to wear with the dress.”
