AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Storm is passing, but there’s an instruction to shelter in place. There are emergency teams working to provide for those who have been hurt or displaced by the storm. I don’t know what the timeline is like, but I’m hoping this should clear up by the end of the week, at least in the sense that the flood water will have gone down, somewhat.”
“Right.”
“Savage?”
“Yeah.”
“Keep her safe. Don’t let anything or anyone hurt my sister.” I can hear it in his voice—the trauma, the memories. It must have been real fucking tough to deal with Hannah’s illness as a boy. Cash is already hyper-protective of the people he loves.
“I won’t, brother.”
“I believe you.” And then he hangs up.
I stare at the phone, squeezing it, a cold wind plucking at the back of my neck. It’s icy out here, but I don’t care. I can’t go back in there and see Hannah right now. How can I simultaneously regret what happened, but want to go back and do it over again anyway?
She drives me crazy. She’s always driven me crazy, and I’ve been so fucking diligent about avoiding contact with her for fear I will lose control in exactly the way I did.
My dick is already twitching again at the memory of her on her knees, her greedy mouth open for me, desperate, and the taste of her still on my lips and tongue while I came.
I haven’t had sex in years. The build up to having her was too much for me, and now I’ve done it. I’ve broken everything.
I have no choice. I have to tell Hannah that it can’t happen again. I have to try to make her understand why, but that would mean telling her the truth about everything.
“Fuck.” I stare down at the blackened screen of my phone, shaking my head, then turn to head back to the house.
Twenty-Five
HANNAH
Savage has been out there for a while.
Talking to Cash. Great. I’m sure that’s going fantastically. Cash is such a friggin’ psycho about keeping me safe, that he’s probably putting extra pressure on Savage to protect me. And that’s going to complicate things.
I press my hands to my face and groan.
This is ridiculous.
I want him, and he wants me. And I’m leaving. It’s not like I’m any threat to his private idyllic life here. I need to talk to him.
I push up from the sofa and walk out into the hall. I don’t care if he’s on the phone with Cash, and I don’t care if my brother hears what I have to say, either. I want us to hash this out, because I’m not keeping it bottled up inside.
“Savage?” I call out.
I don’t hear him talking on the phone any more. I try the front door, but it’s locked, the library is open and empty, and the bedroom is too.
The back door?
The one he told me not to go through at the start of my stay here. He took that back, remember? He said you can go wherever you like. Technically, he told me I could use the library as much as I liked.
“Stop equivocating,” I mutter, and then I open the back door and step out onto the porch.
It’s wet, the backyard flooded, but it’s beautiful and crisp out there. Water stretching out toward the borderline, mist drifting between the distant trees, and a glass greenhouse rising ahead of me. It’s slightly raised on a platform just above the water.
A greenhouse?
That makes sense, given the horticulture book Savage returned to the library.
And it’s dry in there. Could he have gone in for a quiet moment to talk on the phone? Out of earshot. Ugh.
