It was a throwaway comment to most, but I meant it completely.
Tarzan didn’t look good at all.
He looked… bad.
Like I needed to give him that lifeline.
Because I had a feeling that I wouldn’t like how it turned out if I didn’t give him something to hold on to.
“How’s she doin’?” he asked. “God.” He rubbed at his heart. “I feel like a large piece of me was ripped right out.”
Cannel sighed, sounding saddened by his words.
Hell, they did that to me, too.
“She’s doing okay,” Cannel lied through her teeth. “She’s burying herself in work.”
That wasn’t completely true, but it also wasn’t a lie.
I had a feeling she was spending more time at work because I was there.
Something in which I wasn’t going to tell a guy that had at least fifty pounds and four inches on me, and I was no slouch in either department.
At six foot four and two hundred and thirty pounds, I was one of the biggest guys in the department.
But Ol’ Tarzan had that and some.
He may be older, but he was no chump, either.
“Y’all be careful on the way home.” Tarzan narrowed his eyes at me.
I gave him a thumbs up, then hurriedly herded Cannel to the door.
We were outside, and about half the parking lot away from the front door, her hand in mine, when she said, “He looks pretty broken up and shocked about that divorce.”
“It was a surprisingly fast one,” I admitted. “From what I’m told. They had a great relationship, then one day, bam. She no longer wants to be with him. He used to be an instructor for the department, so everyone knows and loves both of them.”
“Maybe she has a brain tumor that’s making her make bad decisions,” Cannel suggested.
I snorted. “Her being attracted to me is a bad thing?”
Cannel snickered. “It is for her. Not for me.”
I squeezed her hand and said, “Do you need anything from your vehicle?”
She shook her head but stopped to hold out her foot. “I wore my walking shoes.”
She was in white tennis shoes.
“How do you keep those clean?” I asked, taking in the rest of her.
She was wearing skintight jeans, a white tank top that clung to all the right places, and her white tennis shoes. Her thick black hair fell around her face and down her shoulders, to right above her ass.
“I don’t,” she admitted. “I wash them once a week, and in between washes, I use this shoe protectant. It works about as well as it can with white shoes.”
“Ahh,” I said, loving the way her hand felt in mine. I wondered how long it would take her to realize I still had a hold of it. “That makes sense.”
That question was answered a few seconds later when her hand went rigid in mine, and she gently tried to take it from me.
Instead of holding on to it and scaring her, I dropped her hand instantly, making her sigh in relief.
What the hell had happened to this woman to make her so wary?
I knew better than to ask, though.
At least, at this point, she didn’t trust me with the knowledge of what had happened to her.
I would wait for her to tell me.
The walk took twenty minutes and not fifteen, and in that twenty minutes, we discussed a lot of things—mostly innocuous, mundane things that wouldn’t matter to most people, but seemed to matter to us.
And by the time that we arrived at my front door, I could tell that she was much more comfortable being around me, mostly because she allowed me to take her hand again about five minutes into the walk and hadn’t asked for it back since.
Now we were at my door, and she was once again pulling her hand away, her finger going to her mouth as she absently chewed on the cuticle.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said.
She glanced at me in the porch light and said, “That’s what everyone says.”
I handed her my wallet. “Take a picture of that. Send it to everyone you know.”
She smiled then. “I have two friends that already know exactly where I’m at. If they don’t hear from me by tomorrow, they’ll unleash the furies of hell.”
My lips twitched. “That’s good. Safe. Something that I think more women should implement.”
She said something under her breath that had me frowning hard. I could feel the wrinkles on my forehead crease harder than they ever had before.
“I’m sorry, but could you repeat that?” I asked.
Had I heard what I thought I heard?
“I said.” She paused. “They should learn it at an earlier age. Not only should they learn it, but they should learn it, and live it, even when they’re young. I’m talking, four or five. Even little boys. Everyone should learn it.”
“What exactly do you mean?” I asked warily, afraid where this conversation had taken us. “What do boys need to learn?”
She pushed past me into the house and then said a few words that chilled me to the bone. “What to do if they’re about to be taken.”
CHAPTER 5
I do a thing called: what I want.
-Cannel to Will
CANNEL
I wouldn’t have fallen asleep in the same room as him, let alone the same bed, had I not had any liquid courage in me.
A year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to be in the same vicinity without freaking out.
And now, waking up, I found myself not only in the same room, but the same bed, with Will wrapped all the way around me.
I felt my heart rate pick up, but not in a bad way.
Not in the, ‘I’m about to have a panic attack DEFCON 1’ way. But in a, ‘he’s touching me from the back of my neck to the backs of my knees’ kind of way.
I opened my eyes as a pleasant heat filled me, my gaze roaming around the room I was in while I relished in the heat at my back.
Will did, indeed, live in a cabin.
It was rustic, needed a good coat of paint, and looked like the biggest ‘bachelor pad’ I’d ever seen.
There was one thing in his bedroom—a king-size bed.
And on that bed had been a single comforter, a top sheet, and two pillows that were so old they were practically compacted flat.
That’d been why I’d allowed myself to move into his arms—I needed a pillow and I didn’t want him to give one of his up. So I’d used his bicep as one. Though, when I’d moved into his arms, I’d been slightly buzzed and high on life.
Now?
Well, now I was wondering how I was going to get out of his arms without waking him.
But also finding myself kind of unwilling to move.
It was a weird situation to be in.
Before my capture and captivity, I’d loved cuddling.
I loved curling up on a couch and leaning against Beau’s shoulder or stretching out on the couch and pillowing my head on his hard thigh.
Beau had been a whole lot shorter than me, however. Meaning cuddling with him hadn’t been as easy as my current cuddle partner.
After my captivity, however, I wanted nothing to do with the opposite sex. No hugs. No cuddles. No touches. No closeness.
I think that had honestly hurt Beau the most that first moment we’d seen each other after I’d been rescued—my inability to hug him. I’d broken up with him immediately after hearing the story about how he offered my friend up in exchange for me.