Roxana considered responding, but exhaustion only let her wonder how long she’d been in the bathroom. Her chin dropped, and she leaned against the cool marble corner. She would leave her steamy oasis after a nap.
A loud knock startled her as if she’d fallen asleep. Her eyelashes fluttered and shut until a cool gust rolled over her skin.
Fully clothed, Jason crouched next to her legs. “Gotta wake up, babe.”
“In a minute.” Lethargic, her temple and cheek pressed to the wall. Sleep called louder than the shower and food. “I feel like I’m drunk.”
“Adrenaline crash on top of trauma will do that to you.” His hand rested on her damp knee. The shower pummeled his shirt, slicking its short sleeves against his biceps. “Come on, I’ll put you to bed.”
“My hair.” Her nose wrinkled. “I’m disgusting.”
“Just a little dirt,” he said.
A little dirt would ruin her night in the waiting soft white sheets. “Nope.”
Fingers rested on her wrist as if he were taking her pulse. “Did you eat anything from the bag?”
“Probably should have.” But she’d fallen asleep in a bush of yellow lady slippers instead. Given the choice again, sleep would still trump the calorie bars stored in the bag. Turkey dinner flavored? With an expiration date two decades from now? No thanks.
Jason left the shower without the decency to shut the door.
At least he’d left her alone—for the moment.
“Babe.”
“What?”
“Open your eyes.”
She scowled and squinted.
“Both of your eyes.”
Roxana forced both open and stared at his wet jeans. “Don’t you think you’ve been bossy—”
“Eyes on the pen, babe. Keep ’em there and don’t move your face.”
Damn, he was aggravating. “No.” When he didn’t repeat himself, Roxana hazarded a glance at him. The man wasn’t going to say it again, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to pick this fight.
After a minute of her following his stupid pen up, down, all around, Jason tossed it onto the bench as her eyes sank shut.
He snapped. “Babe.”
If she’d had the strength, she would’ve snapped back. Revenge was best served cold.
“You can’t go to sleep now.” Jason reached for a washcloth stacked on a built-in shelf above her head and crouched next to her leg again. “Not until you eat and can hold a conversation.”
“We’ll see about that,” she muttered.
Jason palmed the back of her calf and lifted her leg to rest on his thigh. A washcloth draped her shin. Her eyes widened as he left a bubbly trail of soap and erased the layer of dirt that clung to her skin. At her bruised, scraped kneecap, he inspected and cleaned the day-old wounds, washed her thighs, and repeated the process on her other leg.
She didn’t know what to say but no longer had trouble keeping her eyes open. He washed the nightmare away, and when she knew it was time to stand and wash her hair, he set the washcloth down and unhooked the handheld shower attachment.
Without a word, she turned away from him and bent her knees on top of the bench. Her eyes closed as the water worked into her hair. Even when he reattached the shower head, he didn’t ask her to re-open them. Jason massaged shampoo into her scalp and worked the debris, tangles, and tension away. He washed out her hair and laid it dripping down her back when he turned off the hot water.
Roxana re-opened her eyes. He stepped from the steamy glass enclosure and returned with a towel as if he hadn’t noticed that he was as wet as she was.
“Thank you.”
His chin lifted. “Can you stand up?”
“Maybe.” She took his hand and then the towel.
“You’d said something about hitting your head.
“Yeah. Hurt like hell.” She didn’t trust herself to bend over and dry her legs, and after wrapping the towel around her chest, she rung out her hair between their bare feet.
“Probably have a concussion.”
Her lips rounded. “Oh.”
“You’ll be okay.” He led her out of the shower but stopped at the bathroom door. “I’m gonna take another shower.” He winked then nudged her toward the bedroom with a lift of his chin. “New clothes are on the bed, and food’s on the desk. Eat, okay?”
The buttery scent of room service floated in the air. Her mouth watered. “Twist my arm.”
He chuckled. “If you feel dizzy, sit down where you are.”
At a loss for words, she drifted toward the bed as he shut the bathroom door. Roxana found a nightgown and matching robe made of a luxurious, silky fabric. Fuzzy slippers rested at her feet, and when she slid them on, she understood what it would be like to walk in the clouds.
Next to the pajamas, a pair of sandals rested on top of khaki shorts, two identical shirts, one black, one white, and undergarments in her size. Roxana had no words and knew a concussion wasn’t the cause.
She changed into the nightgown and matching robe and floated into the main sitting area like a princess. Three covered plates waited on the desk next to several glasses of juice and chilled bottles of water. She lifted the plate covers and found breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “Oh my God…”
Crepes with Nutella and bananas, a Kentucky hot brown, and a strip steak with steamed vegetables. They’d never be able to pay for all of this, but she could only handle one problem at a time and sat down to her feast.
Unable to eat another bite, she rested her fork on the side of a mostly eaten plate of crepes. Jason walked out of the bedroom in a pair of flannel pajama pants and a white undershirt. He perched on the edge of the couch and leaned over so that his elbows rested on his knees. His fingers steepled together, and his gaze locked on the floor.
For a minute, Roxana had almost forgotten why she was stuffing herself in a lavish hotel room. The trepidation in his posture was all the reminder she needed of what had happened. “I’m feeling better.”
He lifted his head and nodded.
“More normal at least.” She rubbed her eyes. “That drunk feeling is gone.”
“Good.”
“Just sort of happened to me,” she rambled. “One second, I was thinking about washing my clothes, the next, I was like a drunk frat boy.”
His grin hitched. “Not that bad.”
Her laughter faltered. “I need to sleep.”
“Give it a few more minutes, then yeah.”
Roxana eyed the plates she’d picked apart. “If you’re hungry, some of this is salvageable.” She moved her fork. “Maybe not the crepes.”
Jason rubbed a hand over his face and leaned into the couch. “I’m fine.”
A distance as wide as the Ohio river seemed to span between them, and she wasn’t sure what that meant. They needed to talk now? Wait for the next day? What about Spiker and Vanka—and his boss had tried to kill him? She wasn’t sure why the enormity of that problem was just hitting her. She stared at her engagement ring, unable to believe that he’d proposed yesterday.
“I don’t want to lose you, Roxana.”
He’d startled her, but the raw texture of his voice made her heart hammer. A barbed-wire knot lodged in her throat.
“I’ve loved you…” He shook his head. “Damn near since the first moment I saw you.”
“But—”
“I know. But, everything.” His head shook. “Everything wasn’t always the way it should’ve been, except for you and me. Nothing happened because of Hagan, and I couldn’t figure out a way to tell you what I did without bringing it back to what I had done.”
“Dated me for…” She swallowed hard, refusing to let emotion override her response. “As a job.”
“It was never like that.”
“Then what was it like?” she whispered.
“I returned every cent Hagan paid for the contractor and stayed by your side.”
Her eyes widened. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“Didn’t get a cha
nce,” he pointed out. “You walked into my life like… bam. Then I found out you might be in danger? As if there was another soul alive that I’d trust to guard against the unknown.”
Her heart fluttered, and she pictured her hard, handsome man as her guardian angel. Long after the trial had ended and her brother’s killer had been sentenced to life in prison, Roxana had felt as if nothing would go wrong when Jason took her hand.
He paced to the far side of the suite with his chin tucked to his chest. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he pulled a deep breath before stalking back toward the couch. His weary blue eyes met her gaze. “Do you remember the day we met?”
“Of course.” It wasn’t every day that a six-foot-plus man made of solid muscles and intelligent eyes introduced himself at the library. “You asked if you could sit at our table.”
He nodded. “But I saw you and your mom earlier that day.”
Roxana’s chin snapped up. “Like a stalker?”
“No.” The corners of his eyes crinkled but his face relaxed as if he’d almost laughed but saw the poor timing. “I’d just moved back into town.”
“I remember,” she said tightly.
“And I needed a voter registration card. Thought the library would have it.”
Her eyebrow arched.
Jason shrugged. “Random errand.”
“But you already saw me?” Her nose wrinkled. “No. People don’t remember strangers.”
“You made a hell of an impression.”
Her stomach lurched. What had she done?
“I came out of the bank. You were pushing your mom into an ice cream shop.”
She didn’t remember anything before they’d met at the library, but they both knew she enjoyed taking Mom for daily outings. “Okay.”
He closed his eyes for a moment as if recalling the day. “A woman knocked over a napkin dispenser on the patio outside the shop."
Roxana suddenly, vividly recalled the moment they walked into a whirlwind of napkins.
“The wind scattered the damn things everywhere,” he continued, “and that lady turned as red as a tomato.”
“You saw that?” Roxana pressed her hand to the base of her throat. That poor woman had been on the cusp of an anxiety attack. A situation she knew well.
“You set the wheelchair’s brake and picked up napkins, chatting with the woman until she snapped out of her funk.” Jason lifted his shoulders with a small head shake. “A couple people grabbed napkins that flew onto their table, but you stayed there and chatted like she was an old friend. Like the whole problem was nothing.”
“It was nothing. She needed help, and I helped.”
Jason crossed the room and lowered himself until he was at eye level with her in the desk chair. He brushed her damp hair over her shoulder, then touched her cheek with the back of his knuckles. The caress slid to her chin and fell away. “The thing is, you believed that.”
“It was,” Roxana whispered.
“No one helped her. No one went out of their way to pick the napkins up and make sure she was okay except you.” He shook his head. “That doesn’t happen in my line of work. Hell, babe, the world’s harsh. That doesn’t happen anywhere unless someone believes their good deed will be capture on a cell phone camera.”
Her forehead furrowed. “That’s cynical.”
“Did anyone else pick up a damn napkin?”
Roxana shook her head. “No.”
“I was across the street and more mesmerized by you than I knew possible.” The corner of his lips quirked. “When I saw you at the library…” He shrugged. “Already in love.”
“That’s not true.”
The mega-watt smile she hadn’t seen since the day before returned. “I knew I’d spend the rest of my life with you.”
Roxana snorted. “Don’t feed me a line, Jason Green.”
“It’s not,” he promised. “You nudged the chair from under the table with your foot, and I was done for.”
Her cheeks heated over what had seemed like a bold move. But she’d only kicked the chair because she hadn’t trusted her voice when he asked to join them. Jason had sat down at the library table, said hello to her mom, introduced himself, and they’d been inseparable from that day on—except during his work trips. “You lied about your job, where you went…”
Lines creased his forehead. “I gave you my cover story and will spend forever making that right.”
Turbulent emotion bucked in her chest. “I don’t know a significant portion of who you are.”
“Significant portion of who I was. I quit.”
She gnawed on her lip. “You quit for me…”
“For both of us. I should’ve done it after the trial wrapped, but hell, I don’t know. I had time off, then didn’t want to walk away from a gig with that much flexibility.”
“You killed people?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“So they didn’t kill me first.”
“This is why I wanted to love an accountant!” Roxana held up her hands. “Hagan’s given me that same answer.”
“It’s the truth. I’m not a mercenary killer, but I stake out situations and provide information on fuckin’ awful people that deserve to die. Not my job to put a bullet in someone’s head, but I play a role.”
“What roles does Vanka play?”
“Vanka’d be the one to put a bullet in someone’s head.”
“Oh.” Roxana couldn’t picture Vanka doing anything messy. “Spiker was the one with the gun.”
Jason’s jaw sawed. “And he’s going to pay for that.”
“What’s Spiker’s job?”
“Who the hell knows anymore.” Jason took another breath. “I had another reason to quit, and before today, I would’ve called it a gut feeling, but something’s rotting from the inside out. I didn’t trust it.”
“Which is why you went on Etsy and hid emergency bags instead of talking to me?”
“When you put it like that…” Jason grimaced. “Yeah.”
After a minute, she asked, “How’s your ankle?”
“Are we okay?”
Roxana’s heart lurched, but she didn’t know. “I want to go to bed.”
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Good idea.”
Jason waited until she’d turned out the bedside light and pulled up the covers to walk through the open bedroom door. He knocked on the wall. “Still awake?”
“Yeah.”
He sat on the side of her bed and swept a hand over the outline of her shoulder. “I will fix the fallout from my job and between us.” His fingers toyed with a lock of her hair before he stood. “Night, babe.”
The raw pain in her heart burned like a blister that couldn’t heal until exhaustion overpowered her into a fit of dreamless sleep.
Chapter 8
The scent of coffee was in the air, and Roxana almost believed her preset coffeemaker had awakened her from a nightmare. But when every part of her ached, including her eyes, she knew bad dreams weren’t the reason. “Did you make coffee?”
“Better,” Jason called from the other room. “I had it delivered.”
Once they worked their way through their more pressing concerns, she would have to remind him that there were two kinds of people in life. The people who used the in-room coffeemaker for free, and the people who didn’t notice that their quadruple-price room-service coffee required gratuity and an assortment of service fees that actually cost more than a coffeemaker.
“From Denny’s?” she asked. UberEats or DoorDash were probably the cheaper option for a cup of Joe.
“Got the crepes again,” Jason answered.
She’d all but licked the plate clean. “Thanks.”
“And an omelet in case you wanted something different.”
Roxana groaned and rolled her eyes. “Does Roland Crosby have his own line of credit that I know nothing about?”
“Something like that.” Jason appeared at the bedroom door. “You feeling b
etter?”
“Worse. Every part of my body hurts.” She closed her eyes and attempted to stretch. “Even my fingers and arm pits.”
He laughed. “Ibuprofen and water are on the nightstand.”
Roxana reached for the medicine and the glass of water, swallowed the pills, and glanced at Jason leaning against the wall, arms crossed. A different kind of hurt put the muscle aches to shame.
He’d give her time to work through what had happened, to understand or whatever, but the truth was, she had to either accept it or move on. Moving on had never been an option. Not even at her angriest. Roxana tugged her hand free from the bedding and reached for him.
Jason approached but stopped a millimeter from her fingers. “What do you need, babe?”
God, men could be obtuse. “Didn’t you say watched and gathered information?”
He lifted his chin. “Yeah.”
“Maybe your boss tried to shoot you for messing up.” Stretching, she snagged his undershirt with her most attractive grunt. “Come here.” He wasn’t hard to pull onto the bed. But she hadn’t expected to see wariness war across his features. “I need you under the covers with me.”
His jaw ticked before he moved under the covers and laid his head on the pillow next to hers.
They were so close but felt farther away than ever. Anxiety pricked down her spine. The light of day could’ve changed his mind about everything. She didn’t want to lose him—and she realized the last ten hellacious seconds were incomparable to the way he felt.
She nudged her foot between his legs and locked her ankle behind his foot. “I love you, and whatever has to happen next, I’ll still love you.”
Relief melted the distance in his eyes. Jason snaked his arm under her pillow and pulled Roxana close until he had wrapped her in a hug with his lips pressed to her forehead. “Love you, babe. More than you’ll ever know.”
They stayed tangled together until she was certain that awful, distant feeling wouldn’t return. Then her stomach growled. “Crepes, round two.”
Jason gave her another squeeze and pulled the covers back.
“And while I’m eating,” Roxana added, “maybe you can explain if we’re gonna cowboy up and have a shootout or something.”
He laughed and laid her down with a kiss. “Stay put. I’ll bring the crepes to you.”
Danger and Desire: A Romantic Suspense Anthology Page 42
