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Without breaking eye contact, he leaned in closer, his breath hot against my skin as he whispered, “Are you sure you want me to help you with your jeans?” The double meaning hung in the air, thick with promise, and I wanted to act on it. Needed to act on it. Because in that moment, our hatred for one another melted away, leaving only raw, unbridled lust in its wake. I reached out and grabbed the front of his shirt, pulling him closer until our lips met in a searing kiss that set my whole body ablaze.
The alarm on the car parked next to us suddenly, for no apparent reason, started going off, and we sprung apart like we were caught siphoninggas from its tank. I jerked in my seat, the pain that it caused a reminder that I needed medical attention, and he jumped on the spot, tossing my jeans over his head. “Sonofabitch!” he yelled, bending over to retrieve them. He smacked the dust off them, then quickly put them on up to my knees. “You can do the rest of the way. I’ll just get myself in trouble if I help you any further.”
I smiled to myself as he made his way over to the driver’s seat and got in, slamming the door. Once I shimmied the jeans over my hips as best I could, he put the vehicle into reverse and started to drive away from the beach. “I’m going to take you to the nearest hospital, hopefully it’s not too busy.”
I shook my head. “Just take me back to the estate. My hamstring is not torn, just a bad pull is all.” He looked at me like I was nuts. “Trust me, I know what it feels like for it to be torn. This is not that.”
He glanced at me and then did a double take. “But the back of your thigh… it’s black… That’s a pretty good indication that something is not right.”
I sighed. “Look, all I need is some ibuprofen, crutches, ice, pillows and a thigh compressor bandage. Can you take me to a drug store for all of that?”
“Walmart is our best bet, but I seriously think you should go get checked out. How can youpossibly tell if it’s not ripped somewhere?”
“Because the last time it happened, it felt like my leg was ripped in half.”
“What the hell caused it? Surely it wasn’t from kickboxing!”
I hated the thought of telling him, but I knew if I didn’t, he wouldn’t give up. “Nope. It happened when I was left for dead in the middle of a train track after being dragged behind my ex-boyfriend’s car.” I inwardly groaned and clamped my mouth shut. I said way too much just now.
He glowered at me. “What the fuck? A train track? What’s his name? I'll hunt him down and do the same thing to him.”
As touched as I was by his proclamation, I knew better than to let anyone else get tangled up in the mess of my past. “No, you won’t. It was a long time ago, he’s history. Let’s just focus on getting what I need and heading back.”
His jaw tensed. “How did you escape?’
I sighed heavily. “A trucker was coming down the road. Thank God he had his window open and heard my screams.”
“How long did it take for you to recover?”
God, I did not want to talk about this. “A year,” I said with finality.
That’s all I was giving him. He didn’t need to know that 6 months of that was laying on my front so that the skin on my back could heal. And he certainly didn’t need to know that my ankle had to be put back together with screws and a steel plate.
He eventually nodded without saying a word and turned his attention back to the road ahead. The rest of the drive was filled with an uneasy silence, the weight of unspoken words hung heavy in the air between us. When we finally pulled into the Walmart parking lot, I could sense his internal struggle as he turned off the ignition.
“I’ll come in with you and get you one of those scooters to ride on,” he stated firmly, more as a promise than a question. I didn’t argue, knowing that trying to prevent him would only prolong the inevitable.
Without a word, he got out of the vehicle and came around to my side. Scooping me up in his arms, I wrapped my arms around his neck for the second time today and felt right at home. If he wanted to keep carrying me around like this in the store, I wouldn’t object to it I decided.
But alas, he didn’t. Once inside, he marched right over to the only scooter that a couple of kids were playing on. “Get off!” he barked. “This isn’t a babysitter. Go find your mother.”
“Rory! For god’s sake that was rude of you,” Isaid as he dumped me onto the seat.
He looked down at me and shrugged. “It’s true, it’s not a toy. Come on. We need to get the supplies you need and get home. That leg of yours is starting to swell and seeing how you’re too stubborn to go see a doctor, it needs elevating, quick.”
He grabbed a shopping cart, and we made our way through the store to the pharmacy section, gathering everything except the ice that I would need. With each item he placed in the cart, it felt like a brick fell away. His kindness touched me in a way I never thought I would feel again. Trust in a man. Slowly the walls I had built around myself were crumbling down, at least where he was concerned.
As we waited in line at the pharmacy counter to pay, he finally broke the silence. “I’m sorry that happened to you,” he murmured, his voice barely above a whisper. It was all he needed to say for me to feel the floodgates threatening to burst open. He was the first person to have ever said that to me.
But I held them back, swallowing past the lump in my throat as I turned to him with a shaky smile. “Thank you for helping me today.”
He passed me the crutches as he pulled out his wallet to pay, and I took them and stood up. “Don’t mention it.”
Chapter 12
Rory
Declan insisted on calling one of our own ‘doctors’ to make a house call. Once the doc agreed that it was just a badly pulled hamstring, he gave her a shot, and she was off to LaLa land.
