“No,” she says. “No, it’s not.” She hesitates and adds, “Especially not tonight.”
It’s a confession I believe I’ve inspired by being honest. And I want to know more.
“Why not tonight?” I ask.
“You don’t know me. You don’t need to pretend to care.”
“I don’t pretend. Ever. And as for barely knowing each other, we are the freest we will ever be together. You don’t have to choose to see me again. You don’t have to think about the mistakes we’ve made together. You don’t have to do anything, including answering my question.” And yet I ask again, “Why not tonight?”
She exhales a shaky breath, her fingers twisting in my lap, her gaze shifting forward to the window drizzled with rain. The storm has slowed now, at least the one unleashed by the sky, but I have this sense that there is one inside her, as there is one inside me, and neither are even close to calm. “My mom died last month,” she says. “My dad is deploying to Iraq next week.” She glances over at me, pain in those beautiful green eyes. “If that’s not enough, I live in a house I inherited from my dead grandmother who I loved very much.”
I want to scoop her up. I want to kiss her. Hell, I want to get her naked and make her and me forget all the shit going on in our lives. I want to be lost in Candace. But before I choose what comes next, I need to know one thing. “Do you have a boyfriend, Candace?”
“No. I mean, I did, but it wasn’t serious. He was military and a little too busy trying to impress my father for me to feel like anything was about me. What about you?”
“No one,” I say with no hesitation.
No one.
The words linger in the air and I’m aware of the heaviness they hold. She studies me with interest, and I’m aware, even before she asks the question, that she wants to pluck them from the air, hold them, and understand them. “Why are you here alone, Rick Savage?”
I fix her in a deep stare, and I say exactly what I feel. “To meet you,” I say softly with a rough, affected quality to my voice I barely understand. But I don’t fight it. “I just didn’t know it yet.”
The storm erupts again, an explosion of rain, wind, and hail a curtain over the windows, a crack of thunder following. Intense. We don’t speak, but there is a pulse between us, and I say fuck it. I need to kiss her. I move toward her, and instead of backing away, she moves into me. We’re in the middle of the seat when my fingers tangle into the soft strands of her hair and my mouth lowers to hers. “I’m going to kiss you now, unless you object,” I say “because I have an absolute need for this to be what you want, too.”
“Kiss me already, Savage,” she whispers.
“Rick,” I say. “Call me Rick.” And then my mouth collides with her mouth, licking into her mouth, the taste of her sweet honey on my tongue.
She lets out a tiny moan and then her arms slide around my back, her soft, curvy body pressing against my body, and it’s all I can do to keep my hands in her hair. And I have no idea why that feels so important with Candace, but it does. At least at this very moment. I pull back and she stares down at me. “Do you want to get out of here? Together?”
Her fingers curl on my T-shirt but she doesn’t move away. In fact, she seems to melt into me. “I don’t do things like this,” she whispers. “Ever.”
I like that answer, I think. I like that I’m the one that made her kiss a stranger in the middle of a storm. I kiss her again and when she’s breathless, I say. “Then make me the first.”
I blink back to the present, my eyes on the road ahead of me, but my mind is still with Candace. I was never immune to her or her to me, and I don’t regret falling for her, or her for me. I regret following her father to my first kill. Because I can never know she’s safe. Ever. I will always have an enemy. And she will always share those enemies.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Savage
Estes Park is a small little mountain town with a population of six thousand, give or take a few hundred. The path to get there is a climb through the mountain, by way of narrow winding roads with no railings and steep drops. The higher we get, the thinner the air, sure to slow down the enemy. Just not us. We’re bad-asses.
“I was here once, a year ago,” Asher informs us. “I stayed at the Stanley Hotel. It’s supposed to be haunted as fuck.”