Page 71 of The Complete Truth Duet
Her eyes were free of tears.
Breath filled her lungs.
Not a droplet of blood tainted her blue tank.
She was alive.
She was okay.
She was…
“Where the fuck have you been!”
Cora
I froze, the smile on my face falling as his crazed eyes continued to race over me.
“Excuse me?” I snapped.
He stopped in front of me, anchored his hands to his hips, and bit out, “You’ll be back in a few? A few?” He laughed with negative amounts of humor. “Three fucking hours is not a few!”
“Okay?” I drawled, glancing up and finding Drew standing on the third-floor balcony. Even at that distance, the relief painting his features was staggering.
When I shifted my gaze back to Penn, I got my first real look at him. His eyebrow was split and swollen, and smears of blood disappeared into the hair above his temple.
My.
Heart.
Stopped.
“What happened to your face?” I rushed out. “Oh God, where are the girls?” I started to race past him, but he caught my arm, pulling me up short.
“Asleep,” he clipped, but his face was so filled with anger that it offered me no comfort.
“Then what’s wrong?”
His hand got tight on my arm, and then every hair on the back of my neck stood on end as he dragged me closer. His upper body loomed over me as he leaned forward, bringing his face to mine, where he seethed, “Where the fuck did you go for three goddamn hours without even taking your phone?”
I blinked. I didn’t recognize the man holding me so harshly. He was an utter stranger.
His jaw was tight, ticking at the hinges.
The veins in his neck bulged as if they were trying to escape his body.
And his eyes—they were not those of the man who held me every night as I fell asleep. They were wide, furious, and downright malevolent.
My mouth dried, a seed of fear settling in the pit of my stomach. But before I allowed it to grow, I made one last-ditch effort to see if my Penn was still in there.
I stared up at him, refusing to show him any weakness, and demanded, “Let me go.”
His eyes darkened, but his hand fell away in the next beat.
I blew out a ragged breath and slapped a hand over my heart, which was attempting to break free of my ribs. “What the hell is going on with you right now? Who’d you get into a fight with?”
“Drew,” he replied.
I slanted my head in confusion. “Any particular reason?”
“How about we worry less about my fucking cut and more about the fact that you left.”
“Yeah. And I sent you a text.”
“No. You sent me a text saying you’d be back in a few. And then you were gone for three fucking hours. I’ve been losing my goddamn mind thinking something had happened to you.”
While I hated that he’d been so obviously fretting, it made me all warm inside to know he was worried about me.
Placing my hand on his bicep, I gave him a reassuring squeeze. “Penn, baby, everything’s fine. I had to run an errand.”
His brow furrowed and his chest heaved. “For three hours?”
“Yeah. Three hours. And, now, I’m tired. So can we go upstairs and talk about this in bed? We’ll just flip the mattress onto the floor and you can put it together tomorrow night.” I released him and started toward the stairs.
The crunch of his boots on the gravel followed behind me.
“Where’d you go?” he asked roughly.
I rolled my eyes and kept going. “To run an errand. I already said that.”
“What errand?” he demanded when we hit the second floor.
With twisted lips, I slowly turned to look at him over my shoulder. “It’s none of your business. I had something to do. I did it. I’m home. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It matters to me!” he yelled—without actually raising his voice at all.
There was no way I could tell him about Catalina needing money. But I wasn’t real excited to lie to him, either. And if I said the word lie before giving him whatever reason I hadn’t come up with yet, I didn’t think it would placate him much.
I started toward the third floor. “Are you going to yell at me all night? Because, if so, I’m gonna take a pass on hanging out.”
“I swear to God, Cora. I will only ask you this one more time. Where the fuck did you go?”
Like nails on a chalkboard, it made my skin crawl. He sounded like every man I’d ever had in my life. And not in a good way.
“None of your business,” I shot back.
To his credit, he didn’t touch me again.
To my credit, my head didn’t explode as he followed me up so closely that his boot shared the same step with my flip-flop half the time.
Drew was gone when we hit the third floor.
And so was my patience.
