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“Let’s get inside,” I said, not leaving any room for argument as I opened the front door of the cabin.
Once inside, she went and leaned against the countertop, looking at me with anger. “That dog can’t stay cooped up all day. He’s going to start chewing your computer cables.”
“Are you talking about the dog or you? Because he’s never chewed anything but that rubber bone a day in his life.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Look, I appreciate you taking care of him, and I know it’s hard for you to stay inside all day, but it’s not safe for you out there until we know where Alex is.” I handed the bag to her and looked at her hard. “I need to talk to you about your apartment.”
8
MACY
I wished that I’d just turned around when I’d gotten the voicemail telling me that he was in Nashville, gone to the apartment to pack my shit, and gotten the hell out of this one-horse town where anyone who’d ever seen me could give me away to Alex if he bothered to ask.
It would’ve been so easy; I could’ve just gotten rid of my phone and gotten another burner, traded in my car for a different one, and gone straight to Knoxville or anywhere else and gotten lost in a big city.
But no. No, instead, I’d been entranced by a pair of dark green eyes and broad shoulders of someone who was acutely sure of himself and of what to do when I’d had no idea.
That was the problem with a panic attack; it clouded all your rational thoughts and eliminated all possibilities of doing what was made the most sense. Instead, you wound up trusting the sexy guy with the cute dog who’d offered you a safe port in a storm.
I sat in the corner of the couch, wavering back and forth between cursing my desire to run far away and being thankful that I’d been out of the apartment when Alex had gotten there and decided to destroy it. Every time I stopped to think about what Dillon had described to me, I started to shake, and I had to go back into taking the slow, deep breaths that I’d always taught my clients to take whenever the world got too big for them.
“Look,” I heard Dillon’s voice saying as he came over to take a seat on the coffee table, “I don’t mean to be a dick, and I don’t mean to be controlling. But when you turned up on my doorstep and I realized that your situation was so much more serious than just needing a drive back to your car, I couldn’t help feeling responsible for you.”
“Why?” I said into my knees. “You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know that no one deserves to be treated the way he treated you. No matter what,” he said, prompting me to look up at him. His green eyes were smoldering with anger. “I might not be a cop anymore, but the instincts are still there and they run deep to keep people safe. You need help and I’m going to help you until you don’t anymore.”
“But why?” I asked, feeling like I might actually go insane without an answer. “You don’t actually owe me anything.”
He met my stare evenly for long enough that I started to feel uncomfortable before getting up and heading into the kitchen. “What can I say? It felt a little like fate for you to show up here that day. And my uncle was always the type to tell me that if it was in my power to help someone and I didn’t, I was failing. Wouldn’t you help me if the roles were reversed?”
I kept looking at him as he puttered around the kitchen, biting down on my lip as I thought over the hints of his life that he’d dropped so far. He’d been a cop in Nashville, and Ally had told me about his uncle, who had owned this cabin. The more I thought about it, the more his life story seemed to unfold in front of me.
“Is he why you became a cop?” I asked quietly as I continued to look at him.
He shrugged one of his shoulders as he turned on the coffeepot. “Kinda. He bought this place before I was born, and then when I needed a place to live, he didn’t hesitate to open up his home to me.”
I wondered what had happened to his parents. I could practically hear his mind whirring as he waited for me to ask him about them, but everything about him told me that the way he’d lost them had been traumatic. If it hadn’t specifically been the loss of his parents, it had been some other loss in his life that had affected him deeply, and I didn’t want him to think that I was just invested in digging into his private pain.
I got up off the couch and went to the counter, where Dillon handed me a mug of coffee that he’d fixed exactly as I liked it. I accepted it and watched as he started pulling out the ingredients for lunch, which looked to be soup of some kind. I was excited about getting something warm and hearty to eat. I sat on one of the barstools and sipped my coffee as I waited for the food to be ready, thinking about the soups that my mom used to make and how badly I wanted to talk to her.
“Do you think that I can use your phone? I’d really like to call my mom and at least give her an update on what’s going on out here. Let her know I’m safe.”
He’d asked for my phone before he’d gone into town, making sure to take out the SIM card and destroying that before destroying the phone itself. By the end, it’d looked like he’d put it in the food processor. Honestly, I didn’t hate the idea. I would’ve given anything that kept Alex from being able to call me, but the downside was that now my mom also had no way of contacting me.
Now, the knowledge that the only ways I had of getting in touch with my mom were in his hands made me feel a little bit cagey. I just hated the idea of being beholden to him for anything more than I already owed him; it was distressing.
He looked up at me, a little sadly. “That’s not a great idea. We still don’t know exactly how he’s been able to find you. It might’ve been through her phone records.”
I sighed, huffing heavily through my nose as I stared him down. He had a good point, but that didn’t change the fact that I was disappointed by it. Or by his high-handedness.
I was quiet as he continued to move around the kitchen, chopping all of the onions and carrots for the base of the soup and pouring olive oil into a deep pot that he put on the stove. I watched him move with such confidence through the kitchen and processed how measured each of his actions were, putting together more clues about him as I went.
“Was your uncle the one who taught you how to cook?”
He snorted as he continued with his chopping. “Hell no. That man basically lived on canned beans and hot dogs. He’d have raised me on them too.”
