Page 49 of Never Alone
"Wear this."
I looked at him.
"You bought me a ring?"
"We can just return it when this whole thing is over."
He didn't look at me when he said it. He just moved past me down the hall and went into the bathroom.
I stood at the counter and opened the box.
It was a simple ring. A small stone. Nothing showy, nothing extravagant, nothing that would have looked wrong on a baker.
He had thought about that.
Cole had gone to a store, stood at a glass case, and picked out a ring.
I closed the box and held it in my hand for a beat longer than I needed to.
I was starting to feel something I had not felt in years. I didn't know what to do about it.
I picked up my glass of water and took the ring back to the bedroom with me.
Noah hadn't moved. I set the ring on the side table next to my water and slid under the covers.
The sheets smelled like Cole.
It was the first thing my body registered. Before the dark. Before Noah's steady breathing. Before anything else.
I should have been thinking about Nicholas. He had found us.
But I lay in Cole's bed, wrapped in his sheets, with his ring on the table beside my head, and the part of me that knew how to be afraid was quiet.
I turned, pressed my face into the pillow that smelled like soap, clean laundry, and the man whose neck I had put my face against on the worst night of my life.
CHAPTER 10
Cole
I'd been waiting two days for it to bother me.
It hadn't bothered me. That was the thing I could not make sense of.
Two days ago, Tessa had walked into my apartment with a duffel bag and her son and hadn't walked back out. By every measure I had used to organize my life since I was eighteen years old, the thing should have been costing me. There was a shampoo on my pillow that I hadn't bought. There were small shoes by my front door. I hadn't slept in my own bed in two nights. I was a few hours from signing a lease on a place that would have my name and her name on the same line.
The cost had not arrived. The bracing was still there. There was nothing for the bracing to do.
I'd walked the bay twice this morning. I'd checked the rig once, and then checked it again. I'd been turning the same piece of nothing over, and the morning was running out of things to give me to do.
The kid was the part I hadn't braced for at all.
He hadn't asked to touch the model on the shelf the first night. He'd stood with his hands at his sides and looked. He'dtaken his plate to the sink the next morning without checking. He was a kid who carried rules from somewhere.
I'd been a kid who carried rules from somewhere.
"You only started dating, and she's already moved into your apartment, Lieutenant?"
Martinez was at the bay door. I hadn't heard him come up.
