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Mick immediately unsnapped his seatbelt and her own, and reached to pull her into his lap. It was a tight, awkward fit; there was barely room for his knees alone behind the wheel, but he managed to manoeuvre her close. She lay quietly against his chest as he stroked her back, ran shaking hands over her arms and neck. Her hands were clenched in fists near her wet cheeks and her tears soaked into the fabric of his shirt.
“Jesus,” he said on a long expulsion of breath.
Quite.
“Thank Christ I was early,” he muttered into the damp hair at her temple.
For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder how exactly he’d managed that timely rescue. Sniffing, scrubbing ineffectually at her face with her hand, she straightened and looked at him.
“What were you doing there?” she asked, trying not to think about those terrifying seconds before he’d appeared. Although the whole incident was starting to take on an unreal, blurry quality, like it was something she’d seen on TV right before falling asleep.
Mick grimaced.
“Obeying a fortunate instinct?” He gave a half-shrug, his concerned eyes moving across her features. Her swollen, blotchy features. It was probably a good sign that she could feel a rush of self-conscious vanity about her running nose. “I don’t know. I just had a feeling, ever since I left your place this afternoon.”
“What, that my shift was going to coincide with a once-in-a-blue-moon would-be abduction?”
“No. Fuck. No.” Mick scowled blackly, rubbed his thumb over his bristly jaw. “About Gallagher.”
“About Dale,” Sophy repeated. She was developing a wicked headache in the centre of her forehead. Pushing against Mick’s chest, she made a graceless return to her own seat, and he let her go.
“About Dale and those bloody packages.” Mick turned the key in the ignition, switched off the idling engine. “You know he’s the one sending them.”
He didn’t phrase it as a question, but a statement of fact.
Sophy shook her head, but her denial was not nearly as emphatic as it had been the first time this subject had been raised. She had eyes and she had a brain, and she’d seen everything that Mick had doubtless seen in their silent encounter with Dale that afternoon. She…wondered. That was all. And this was one of the last things she felt like discussing right now.
“I need to go to bed,” she said, and even to her own ears, her voice was exhausted and flat.
Mick reached for his door handle and she put out a quick hand, stopped him.
“A – alone,” she stammered, colour rising in her cheeks. “I just – I think I need to be by myself for a little while, okay?”
It obviously was far from “okay”. A person could bounce coins off Mick’s jawbone. His gaze was a fierce, piercing black on hers.
“I –” He stopped, hesitated, the muscles in his throat moving as he swallowed. “I don’t want to leave you.” The words seemed to have been wrenched out of him.
Renewed tears stung Sophy’s lashes.
“I know,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t – deal with this all right now.”
“Deal with this.” Mick’s voice was equally flat. “Deal with what happened tonight? Or deal with me?”
“I can’t.” It was the only answer that she had.
“Sophy.” He looked down at his hands, seemed to realise that they were fisted, the knuckles white, and made an obvious effort to straighten them. “I’m sorry that – that you had to see – that I –”
She realised immediately where he was going with that train of thought, perhaps why he looked quite so shattered, apart from his horror at what could have happened to her. Even in her own torn-apart state, she couldn’t bear him to have those sorts of doubts. She reached out a hand, placed it over his own and watched as his fingers turned and folded around hers with an almost brutal strength.
“Mick,” she said. “I’m so grateful. If you hadn’t been there… And honestly,” she said, and was completely serious about it, “I thought you were actually quite restrained. The bastard tried to drag me out of the bar and then came at you with a broken bottle. At the very least, I was expecting you to throw him headfirst into the pool table.” She managed a tiny smile and lied, hoping to pull him back from his mood. “I’m almost disappointed.”
The whole scene had been too much for her. But there was no way in hell, whatever happened between them from this point on, that she wanted to be mentally associated with his mother, afraid of him and thinking he had a propensity for violence.
He was silent for a long time, watching her closely, and eventually, finally, something eased a fraction in his eyes. He didn’t quite make it to a smile, but he did produce a wry sort of grimace.
“They’d better throw the fucking book at him,” was all that he said.
Geez. She was probably going to have to appear in court this time. She was obviously starting to recover from the shock, since these lesser horrors were queuing up to take precedence over the “what ifs”.
