“So where are you going?” Jude asked.
She straightened her spine and lifted her chin in the air, like either of those things were going to stop us from making sure she was covered away from the house.
“None of your business,” she said, heading for the living room with her coffee in hand.
Jude’s arm shot out to stop her and coffee splattered out of the open slot in the cup’s lid.
“Dammit, Jude,” she said, looking at the drops of coffee on her hand.
I grabbed a paper towel and took the cup from her hand, then wiped it off before handing it back to her.
“You are our business now, sweetheart. I’ll get my coat.”
30
LILAH
“Where are we going?”Nolan asked, leaving the long drive leading to the house and pulling onto the main mountain road.
I stared straight ahead. “I can’t believe you’ve beentrackingme.”
“I’m sure it was a shock finding that out,” he said sympathetically.
“Are youtherapizingme?” I glared at him from the passenger seat of the blue Lotus he drove when he wasn’t working. I still hadn’t figured out if the cars in the climate-controlled underground garage had specific owners or if the Bastards shared them, but the guys definitely had preferences.
He stopped the car at the end of the drive. “Not at all. Just acknowledging your feelings. So where to, sweetheart?”
I folded my arms over my chest. “Town.”
“Vague, but it’s a start,” he said.
He turned left, pointing the Lotus toward downtown Blackwell Falls.
I watched as the mountain landscape passed by on the other side of the window. Most of the snow was gone now, and there was even less of it as we made our way down the mountain. I sawthe promise of spring in the buds on the trees, the sun that shone warm overhead.
It took me a minute to recognize the feeling in my chest as hope. I had no business feeling hopeful, not with my life on hold, my savings account dwindling, Vic out there with Mr. Suit doing god only knew what.
I didn’t want to admit it was because of Nolan and Jude. And okay, even Rafe in a way, because the truth was I’d started to feel safe with all of them, if safe meant not worrying someone was going to hurt you but worrying you were going to hurt yourself by doing stupid things with more than one treacherous guy.
The person I’d been when I’d fallen into the foyer of the mountain house six weeks ago would have felt sorry for this version of myself, a version who had started not only to tolerate the Bastards but to like them (two of them anyway), a version who had, without even realizing it, started to trust them.
A version who felt hopeful because of them.
Funny thing about hope: it was hard to feel when you were barely getting by, when you were working sixteen-hour days seven days a week and still had to worry about your electricity getting shut off.
It was even harder when you were alone in the world, when you knew one wrong move — or one unforeseen emergency — could send you flying off the tightrope you were walking. Could send you plunging to your death.
Being at the mountain house, living with the Bastards, had given me a kind of mental space I hadn’t known existed. Sure, I was eating through my savings to continue paying the rent and utilities on my apartment, but I didn’t wake up every morning and go to bed every night worried about keeping the roof over my head. I didn’t lose sleep wondering if I could survive on a can of soup, two slices of bread, and a half-moldy tomato until payday.
And something else had happened, something even weirder: I was breathing easier in my body too. I’d felt… vulnerable before, on my own. I’d done all this training to be able to protect myself — lifting weights at the gym, taking self-defense classes, carrying my knife, learning to grapple with someone who wanted to take me down — but I’d still been terrified.
Before Vic had chased me through the woods, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate the threat I’d felt, but looking back, I knew it was good old-fashioned fear.
Of everything.
Threats had seemed to be around every corner, and deep down I’d known I was deeply alone in facing anything that might crawl out of the woodwork. Looking back, I’d felt that way since I was a kid, my mom’s doom-and-gloom warnings working their way into my bones until I didn’t trust anybody or anything.
I was still wrapping my head around the fact that the three men who’d validated everything I’d been taught — that no one was to be trusted, that only God was a refuge — were also the ones now making me feel safe.