I hold my hands out in the air on either side. It just seems like the thing to do. I’m a tight-rope walker in one, two, three steps. When I leave the line behind, I turn my palms up and offer him a dry, “Tada.”
I didn’t mean it as an invitation, but it feels that way.
His gaze moves down my body, taking its sweet time and turning an inspection into a statement of interest. Heat flares in his eyes. I’m sure it’s there, but the next second it’s gone, replaced by that impersonal cop stare.
For the briefest moment, he definitely checked me out.
Did he like what he saw? A shiver ran down my body. I shouldn’t care about that. It’s just that it had been so long since I felt that kind of interest. Never, really.
The kind where she had a choice.
“You got a jacket in the car?” he asks.
The night breeze runs over my skin, making goosebumps. Not because it’s cold. Because it’s a tactile awareness of his gaze. I can’t ever admit that to him. To anyone. Hell, I shouldn’t even admit it to myself. And I’ll let him bundle me in a down feather jacket if I don’t have to explain the real source of her chills. Sexual awareness. A foreign feeling but undeniable.
Well, good thing I’m leaving here. And I’ll be far, far away.
Never to return. I’ll never have to see the sheriff again, and why does that suddenly seem worse than everything that came before? Like the worst tragedy in a sad story?
“Okay, I believe you,” he says. “You’re not drunk.”
“Thank you.”
“But you are unfit to drive. I can’t ignore how you were driving earlier. More importantly, I can tell you’re exhausted just from looking at you. It’s a danger to the people around here. And it’s a danger to you.”
Blood rushes to my face, because what does he know about the danger to me? What does he know about fists and locks and being given as a gift before I could walk?
I wish I could be angry at him, but he’s right.
It’s something else that makes my cheeks hot. Shame.
Ky deserves better than this, even if I don’t know how to give it to him. Exhausted. That’s what the sheriff called me. Not only from driving for hours, from running tonight. I’m bone-deep tired. Soul-deep tired.
“I understand.” I swallow hard, more deflated by this one moment than I was for years of pain and powerlessness. This moment seems to cut deeper than all of them, standing in front of this man who is so far above me. “I’ll sleep it off in my car until daylight, and then we’ll go.”
“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that either.” The drawl shrank under the serious, almost regretful tone.
That old anxiety resurfaces—mistrust of anyone with a badge, of anyone with a dick. “Why not? I wouldn’t be endangering anyone that way.”
“Well, there’s no way I could trust you to stay put unless I also stayed out here all night, which I’d rather not do. Then there’s the fact that leaving you out here and defenseless wouldn’t be safe for you.”
“Do you have any ideas, then? Because I’m fresh out.”
“Is there someone who can come pick you two up?”
CHAPTER FIVE
At this all the guests trembled, and many of them began to weep. The king and queen wept loudest of all. For a curse like this could not be broken.
Jessica
My sleep-starved mind turns the question over like it’s completely new. Like I’ve never before wondered if anyone could help me. First my mother had failed me. Then my father. God, every person who looked the other way on the sidewalk when a teenage girl cowered beside a man old enough to be her father had failed me.
That was the way the old Jessica saw the world.
Then the little window on the pregnancy test showed positive, and everything changed. This was my fresh start. Ky had a real chance at life. And I learned to look on the bright side.
Like the fact that I can take care of myself and him. Usually.
Loneliness rises like acid. “No.”
Crickets serenade us in the pause that followed. The sheriff doesn’t look like he’s coming up with an idea. He looks like he’s trying to talk himself out of one.
Finally he says, “You can sleep at the police station.”
My mouth falls open. “You’re putting me under arrest?”
“Absolutely not,” he said smoothly.
“Would I be sleeping a cell?”
After a pause, “Yes.”
“So let me get this straight. You want to take me, in your police car, to the police station, where I’ll spend the night in jail. How is this different from being arrested?”
He cocks his head. “Less paperwork?” At my small noise of protest, he looks apologetic. But unrelenting. “The cot is very comfortable, I’ve been told.”
