Minutes ticked by as I tried to stay coherent, keep my brain functioning. I started a tally of how many times I counted to sixty—eighty-four times. Or maybe it was ninety-four. The tally marks I made in the ice on the wall started fuzzing out on me. And the shaking stopped. Shit, this was bad. This was bad. The floor actually wasn’t that uncomfortable; it was a rubber matting that didn’t hold the cold, so it felt good. Good enough to lie down on after a while, sleepiness getting harder and harder to fight. I thought of my dad. He’d be so sad if this went down this way. And Lily. And Abby—oh, my Abby, my beautiful girl. She would miss me, she would be heartbroken. Gracie, my girl, she’d miss me for sure. And Missy. And what about Ian? Would Ian cry if I died? Would he go back home and pine for me like I’d pined for him, would he go back and find the pretty brunette and live happily ever after? He never did answer me about who she was.
Duncan.
Duncan, who said I was worth it. Duncan with the eyes that melted my heart and turned my bones to mush with his smile. I thought of the slow kisses he was so good at. The ones I always wanted to rush. Why did I do that? Why couldn’t I have just savored what he was giving me? Why didn’t I tell him I was falling for him too? My heart hurt, knowing he’d never know that. I wondered if he would be sad once I was gone. Would he forgive me and then be sad?
Abby. Her beautiful face and wild blonde locks and blue eyes swam across the backs of my eyelids. My miracle. My one thing I’d done right. I felt tears sting my eyes as I realized I’d never see her again.
“My—Abby,” I said clumsily, my lips not working so well. “My baby.”
Sleep felt wonderful and light and peaceful and warm.
Chapter Twenty-three
Something was shaking me from far away, jiggling everything that wouldn’t move on its own. My soothing blue world became brighter, and invasive. Warm air rushed in on my skin and sounds started taking the form of words instead of noise.
“—by, oh f—” the pieces of words were saying. Ian’s words. “Savi—baby, talk t—”
I felt myself leaving the ground, being jostled, then bouncing as curse words became louder and louder and reality began creeping in.
“No, no, no,” Ian was saying, panic in his tone. “Don’t you leave me.”
I wasn’t going anywhere. I was sleeping. We were running up the stairs. Or he was running. I was floating. My eyes drifted open enough to see his door rushing at us before he kicked it in, which was even louder. Then more running.
The bathroom was different, I thought. Bigger maybe.
Shower for two—that’s naughty
.
“Savi, you with me?” Ian cried, his voice husky as he sat me on a tiled seat inside. I felt myself listing to one side, and he threw on the warm water, blasting us both, clothes and all. His hands were on my face and his eyes were red and wet and full of fear. “You with—” He choked on the words.
“I’m . . . here,” I whispered.
“Oh, God,” he said under his breath. “Hold your arms up, can you hold your arms up?”
I shook my head. “Can’t . . . feel.” He ripped my shirt down the front and pulled it from my body. Well, that’s one we never did. He yanked off his own shirt and hauled me up against him, skin to skin, and stood so the warm water pounded my head and back. Nothing had ever felt better than that.
“Fuck, what were you doing in there?” he said, his voice rattled and uneven.
He was trembling. Or was that me? The shaking was back as my body started a reverse process of coming back to life. Pins and needles of returning blood flow began their burn in my extremities, and still there was a different kind of tremble. It wasn’t me.
As Ian crushed me to him, he broke. I felt the hard hits of sobs racking his chest as he clung to me, holding me under the shower head. My arms were weak and oddly disconnected, but I could feel them again, and I wound them around him.
“I’m sorry. Don’t cry,” I said, my voice crusty.
A sobbed laugh of relief burst from him, and he pulled my face from his neck to look in my eyes. Water was streaming over his head, too, but I could see the utterly wrecked distraught in his eyes.
“You were—” He stopped to pull a ragged breath. “I thought I lost you. You were so fucking gray.”
“Gray’s the new pink,” I said, clearing my throat.
He shut his eyes and pressed his lips to my forehead, all the while working his hands along my back and arms. He was serious, and scared, and I was beginning to feel normal and human and that was because he’d just saved my life.
“I’m sorry,” I said, winding my arms tighter around him, feeling the muscles in his back coil and twist with anxiety.
“Don’t say that,” he mumbled against my forehead. “Please don’t say that. I’m so sorry, Savi. You don’t even know—”
“Yes, I do,” I said. He pulled his face back to look at me, continuing to rub my arms. “I know. You came back to sabotage me.” His eyes closed, and I had the thought that I’d never seen so much misery on one person. I couldn’t even be angry anymore. “It’s okay.”
His hands came up in my hair. “How can you say that?” he whispered.
I took a deep breath, relishing the steam as it filled my lungs. “I know you were stuck between a rock and a hard place. I heard you telling Emery.”
“You heard . . . ?”
“Kinda how I ended up in the freezer,” I said.
“Jesus.”
“Broom is broken now, by the way.”
Ian swallowed and blinked rapidly. “Fuck, this is all my fault. You almost—” He inhaled sharply as if the thought were more than he could bear. “Your hair’s cold, get it back under the water,” he said, turning the temperature up some. “How’s your arms and legs? How’s your heart feel?” He put two fingers at my throat to feel my pulse.
“Hey,” I said, taking his hand. “I’m okay.”
“You weren’t okay, Savi,” he said, his face still drawn and tight. “Your pulse was weak, you were—”
“I know,” I said. “I remember the getting-there part.” I put his fingers back on my throat. “Feel, Ian. It’s okay now. You saved me.” I took a deep breath as I let that sink in and pulled him to me again. “You saved me,” I said against his chest.
He wrapped himself around me, a sensation I wished I could bottle and take out every night. I missed this. And I was going to miss it again. Because it was over.
“I don’t know what made me look in the freezer,” he said. “Thank God I did. Your phone was ringing on the floor in the kitchen when I came back,” he said. “I thought it was Emery’s maybe, but . . . it was Duncan Spoon calling.”
My heart leapt and I leaned back again. “Duncan called?”
I didn’t miss the tiny flash of hurt that flickered through Ian’s eyes before he could mask it. But Duncan called. Oh, my God, maybe he didn’t despise me.
“Evidently,” he said dryly.
I let that go and let the moments roll past, closing my eyes, letting him rub the circulation into my body as the water pelted us, just absorbing it all.
“I went to Bobby’s,” he said finally. I just nodded, and he blew out a breath. “It’s done.”
I looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
He looked at me matter-of-factly. “I mean it’s done. He won’t bother your business anymore. Or Jim’s.”
Dread seeped into my bones. “Why?” I whispered.
“Because I have too much I can go public with,” he said. “He’s not going to take that chance.”
“And you’re saying he just sat back and let you blackmail him like that?”
Ian touched my face, looking at my lips instead of my eyes. I knew that move. And I remembered what Emery had said. I let go of my hold on him and reached up for his face instead, making him look at me. He couldn’t lie to my eyes. At least I didn’t think so.
“I did this, Savi,” he said, his whisper barely more than a breath. “I started this shitstorm years ago, and I refuse to let anyone else pay the price for that.” When I opened my mouth he covered my lips with a finger. His head moved from side to side slowly, water droplets dripping from his hair. “Not you, not my brother, not anyone.”
“What’s the cost?” I breathed against his finger. “Us not selling, Jim not paying up—you blackmailing him—what’s it costing you?”
He lowered his head to mine. “Not enough,” he said. “I’m gonna . . . let you finish in here,” he said, backing up a step, touching my cheek. “I’ll go find you something dry to put on, stay in here as long as you need, soak up the heat.”
He let go of me and backed away, opening the door, holding my gaze until I thought my insides would burst, before he closed it and left me there alone.
I sank onto the ledge as the hot water ran over my body and let the tears fall out.
• • •
I texted Missy on the way home. I figured that many hours of not hearing from me after seeing me go all glazed over might have her a little concerned.
I’M FINE
, I texted.
I DIDN’T GO CRAZY. TALKED TO IAN. MORE TO THE STORY BUT BIG PICTURE IS IT’S ALL OVER. TELL YOU MORE TOMORROW
.
More tomorrow. God, that was all in one day. It felt like it had been at least three. I just wanted to get back home to my Gracie and put on sweats and put my hair up. I still couldn’t get completely warm, but I was better. My hair had had to dry natural, as Ian didn’t own a hair dryer, but he towel-dried my hair to within an inch of its life before he’d let me leave, and it currently resembled a deranged swamp thing.
I pulled up in the driveway and parked facing forward, noting a green Jeep parked at the curb. My heart took off double time. Green Jeep equaled Duncan. Duncan equaled—what?
My hands shook as I got out. He wasn’t waiting in the Jeep, where was he? What was he doing there? I broke out in a jog over the sidewalk, coming to a full stop on the top step of my porch. He was sitting on my porch swing, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, forehead resting on his fists. And when he looked up, the man sitting there was very different from the Duncan I’d come to know.
His hair looked like he’d run his fingers through it too many times, his face held a two-day scruff, and there were shadows under his eyes. When he got to his feet, I noticed he was wearing the same clothes he’d had on two days earlier when I’d come to his house. Holy crap.
“What’s wrong?” I said, taking another step forward.
“I tried calling you,” he said, as if explaining his presence.
The phone call that saved my life.
I closed my eyes and chuckled at that, pushing back the hint of a burn. Enough tears for a fucking lifetime lately. “I’m sorry, it’s kind of been a day. Haven’t even checked my phone.” I focused on him again and took another step closer. He wasn’t backing away, that had to be a good sign. “You look exhausted.”
Duncan ran a hand over his face. “I . . . haven’t slept in . . . a while.”
“Why?” I said, although the word didn’t make much sound. My breathing had gone kind of wonky when I realized he wasn’t looking at me with hate or disgust or repulsion. There was still pain, but underlying that was that old look in his eyes. The one that had made me weak in the knees from day one.
He looked like he was struggling to say something, something heavy or important, his eyes boring into mine, but then he blinked away and looked down, frowning.
“For one thing, I have to tell you something you won’t want to hear,” he said.
“About Ian?” I said, feeling like shit to even speak the name. He looked up sharply, and I nodded. “I already know.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “How?”
Because we broke into your office and your computer
. Yeah, no. My need to spew all my sins and come clean was purged the other night on his doorstep. There was only so much a person could overlook.
Some things need to stay under the rug
. Amen, Missy.
“It doesn’t matter how,” I said. “I know, and I’ve already talked to him about it.”
Duncan looked away and laughed bitterly, raking fingers through his hair. “And that made it okay, I guess.”
“No, it didn’t,” I said, feeling my ire rising. “My God, the two of you are cut from the same damn cloth.”
He looked back at me questioningly. “What?”
“He tells me about you, then gets pissed off when I defend you,” I said. “You tell me about him, and get ticked that I’m defending
him
. Shit, Duncan, I don’t just accept things blindly, I find out for myself. And one thing you should know better than anyone is that there is usually more to the story than what’s in black and white.”
The tension in his face relaxed a little and he looked off in the distance.
“Touché,” he said. He looked me over. “You okay? You look a little ragged yourself.”
Always what a woman wants to hear, but he was right. I wasn’t exactly dressed for company: Ian’s too-big sweatpants rolled up, an oversized T-shirt, the deranged hair, no makeup and probably swollen eyes.
“Well, I sort of . . . nearly died earlier today.”
His gaze became razor sharp, the blue of his eyes like lasers. “What?”