“Where were you last night?” he said. She’d have given him a foil, saved him from the situation with Susan at best, helped him defuse a tense situation with Mike and the crew.
“I was tired. I went to bed.”
“Tired from standing around doing nothing.”
“Yes, you shithead.”
He braced for a pinch or a kick and it didn’t come and that just pissed him off more. She wasn’t doing nothing, she was working double shifts looking for the signal jammer and evidence they could use to shut this place down. But she wasn’t there when he’d needed her last night and she’d avoided him until he’d cornered her after lunch.
“You need to check in with me when I get back into town. I haven’t seen you for a week and I’m only here two days and all you want to do is run till we drop and talk about fucking Monopoly night. We have a week to find that goddamn signal jammer and I need to know you have a strategy to keep Orrin at arm’s length.”
Rory was silent but somewhere close by a goat shrieked like it was being tortured.
After a while she said, “Are you done?” in a steely voice that prickled worse than the grass under his legs.
Nope, but he’d made his point. This wasn’t playtime, this was thousands of lives. She couldn’t just decide to avoid him. They had to stick together.
The goat screamed again; it sounded like it was calling for help. Fuck. She always avoided him when she was pissed with him. “What happened that you don’t want to tell me?”
She knocked the breath out of him when she straddled his chest, shoving his arm away from his face and digging her knees into his ribs. “Me? Nothing. What’s going on with you?”
He took hold of her arms as a precaution against further rough treatment. “I’m peachy.”
“Like hell you are.”
“You’re avoiding me.”
She squeezed his ribs with her thighs. “You have a funny way of understanding avoidance.”
“Last night you—”
“I was tired.”
He could see himself, side by side images in her sunglasses. “All morning you—”
“Not everyone gets exciting jobs building the new world. I had to stand around and do nothing this morning.”
“You knew I’d want to talk.”
She got an arm free and jabbed her knuckles into his ribs, making him grunt. “So talk.”
Yeah, that wasn’t happening. He had nothing to say that wasn’t full of anger for all the wrong reasons. He sat, lifted her off his hips and dumped her pert ass in the grass. Now the goat wasn’t the only one mouthing off.
“You could’ve come to me,” he said, cutting her tirade off, seconds before she left him for dead in a field in the middle of nowhere with a goat that was making more sense than he was.
She slapped her hands at her sides. “How was I supposed to know when you were going to get home? You just want me to wait around for you to show up like this is the ’50s and I don’t have better options.”
He pushed to his feet. Yes, that’s what he’d wanted. To see her lovely face after another week spent in the company of men whose motives he didn’t trust, who he’d just as soon abandon to their fate as rescue. To have her laughter and the comfort of her silence after another week spent building homes for fictional refugees who were meant to become real slaves. He’d worried about what stunt Orrin might pull, what mischief Rory might get into when he wasn’t around to have her back. He’d worried about her coping with being frozen out and broken down or withstanding the opposite pressures if the love bombing had begun. Her confidence had taken a knock when she broke with Cal and it was only sensible to be concerned.
&n
bsp; He’d missed her.
He could call it professional concern all he wanted but it wasn’t that. He’d missed her forever.
“Not yesterday. When you broke up with Cal.” The shocked expression on her face made him look away but it didn’t stop him verbally vomiting all over her. “You ran. I fucking worried about you when you went missing. We all did. And then when you came back you were different.” Withdrawn, easy to anger. Weighted down with sadness. “You never said a word and you were buttoned-up tight. You only wanted this assignment to punish yourself.”
“Zeke, that’s twelve months ago.” He couldn’t read her eyes behind her dark lenses but her lips, her tone told him how she felt about the ice water he’d just poured down her back. Shocked, confused. “Why didn’t you say something before?”