Chapter eleven
Lyla
Itwasbecominga bad habit waking up in strange beds and looking at strange ceilings. Lyla blinked her eyes open, her limbs too weighed down for her to even try to move.
It took her a second to realize there was an actual weight on her, holding her down.
Panicking, she looked down at the bare muscular biceps resting on her stomach, down to the ripped forearm dusted with dark hair going diagonally to her hip, to the large, masculine hand holding her with long, tapered fingers. Burn marks littered places on the back of the hand.
Lyla moved her eyes up to see the man the arm was attached to and found herself ensnared by mismatched devilish eyes, one black, one golden-green, staring at her quietly.
It had been real.
Her fever dream had been real.
He had come for her, albeit after months, but he had.
Facts registered simultaneously in her brain—he was shirtless but she was dressed in something soft, his body was pressed to her side and his face close to her pillow, and there was a lot of natural gray light coming in from somewhere.
Ignoring the first two facts and ignoring him, she turned her neck to seek the source of the light.
And she stopped breathing.
The largest sets of windows she had ever seen showed something she had only ever seen pictures of. Mountains. Tall, majestic, gray mountains.
Scrambling from the bed and pushing his arm away, she tried to stand just as her knees buckled. She almost went down before strong arms effortlessly swung her up in an embrace she recalled from her delirium.
“Easy,” he told her softly, but she ignored him, focused on the vista bare before her.
He carried her toward the glass, toward what she now realized was a set of double doors and not windows. Pushing it open with his foot, he walked them out. A blast of cold air assaulted her skin, making her instinctively curl closer to his body heat, the silk sleep shorts he must have put her in too thin to stand the weather.
He walked them to the edge and placed her on her feet, imprisoning her from the back with both arms on the metal railing, his presence behind her warm in the cold.
But she was focused on the view, on the feeling of being outside.
Her eyes greedily gulped the sight before her, unable to understand how places like this could even exist as she took in every inch of it.
Tall, beautiful, rocky gray mountains spanned as far as the eyes could see on her right, the view wrapping around until it disappeared on the side. On the other side to the left, a gray sea churned under the clouds endlessly, waves after waves crashing on the rocky beach in the distance, a beach created by the natural slope and decline of the mountains that went into the water. And right below her, the cliff steeped into a long, narrow body of water that joined the sea.
It was exquisite, surreal, unbelievable.
“What is this place?” she whispered in awe, unable to believe her own eyes.
“It’s called Bayfjord,” he informed her from her back. “That’s the Iron Mountains, and that’s the Black Bay.”
She took in the sight for a long time, standing in the cage of his arms, unable to register it all, register that not only was she alive, she was in heaven and she was with him.
Reluctantly, she turned around so she could see the house they were in. A gasp left her as she stared up at the rough gray rocks.
They were on some kind of deck made in a slit of the space within the mountain. Within the mountain.
“Are we...how... in the mountain?”
Her broken words made him take a step back, leaving her alone on the edge, and she clung to his hand, terrified of the steep fall off the cliff. And that was so contrary to the woman who had decided to end herself.
She saw him look down at their hands together, his large, dark, burned hands encompassing her small, soft, pale ones.
“Come with me.” He tugged her forward, and she half-heartedly followed, not ready to go back into her own mind or how she felt about him right that second. There was something new to experience, something good, and she grabbed it with both hands.