The Protector (Lone Wolf, Book 1) (17 page)

“I
know
you’re on crutches,”
said Layne soothingly, taking another sip of her coffee and making a face like
it’d burned her, screwing up her nose with a shake of her head as she set the
Styrofoam cup back into her cup holder.
 
“By the way, I think they served us lava, not coffee.
 
I’m going to need reconstructive surgery on
my tongue.”

“Well, normal mortals usually have
to wait for it to cool,” I teased her, blowing into the hole on my lid as I
watched steam curl up from it in an inviting spiral.

For some odd reason, she stiffened
a little at that, circling the steering wheel tighter with her fingers, the
knuckles standing out against the black of the wheel.

I frowned, shook my head, cleared
my throat.
 
“And, anyway,” I continued
as her face relaxed a little.
 
“I just
have this terrible feeling that all of this is leading up to you taking me hiking,
and I just wanted to remind you that I’m on crutches, and can’t exactly power
over the trails like I would normally.”

“Do I look like the kind of woman
who forces hikes on others?” she asked, arching a brow and casting a sidelong
glance at me.
 
A grin tugged at the
corners of her mouth, and her devastatingly handsome eyes—flashing more blue
and green than brown today—seemed to sparkle with laughter that she was
suppressing.
 

“I mean…”
 
I waved my hand in her direction, taking in the entirety of
her.
 
She was wearing her leather
jacket, as usual, today, but it was paired with stone-washed jeans, and a
t-shirt with a screen-printed face of Marilyn Monroe.
 
Layne’s jet-black hair was teased upright.
 
Honestly, she looked like she’d recently
escaped from a time machine from the eighties.
 
“Not
exactly
the hiking type,” I amended.
 
“But I know there’s a lot of hiking to the
north of Boston—”

“Unh-unh.
 
No guessing,” said Layne, holding up a finger and practically
shaking it under my nose.
 
“You said I
could surprise you, and I’m damn well going to do just that.”

“I said I
trusted
you,” I
corrected her, placing my coffee cup back in its holder near the vent.
 
“
Not
that you could surprise me.
 
I mean, who knows where we’ll end up?”
 
I had one brow up, but I was still teasing
her.
 

Across the distance between us,
Layne casually offered her hand, palm up, to me.
 
It was the kind of gesture you make when you want someone to slap
you five.
 
But somehow, I didn’t think
that’s what she was going for.
 
I
realized that my face was red almost immediately as I questioningly placed my
hand, palm down, on hers.

Her fingers wrapped around my hand
as if they’d done it a thousand times before.
 
Layne held my hand tightly, squeezing with a gentleness that made my
knees melt.
 
Thank heavens I wasn’t
standing.

The heat of her palm, the softness
of her skin, was far too intense of a sensation.

“No matter what,” Layne said
softly, her velvet voice pitched in a low growl that sent a shiver down my
spine. “I’ll keep you safe,” she whispered.
 
“So don’t worry.”

My breathing was coming too fast
when she let go of my hand.
 
I rolled
down the window of the car, just a crack, so that the chill air over the sea
could rush into the car and blow against my face just a little, cooling down
the blush.
 
I took great gulps of the
salt breeze and tried to forget how hotly her palm had burned against mine, how
soft her fingers had felt entwined with my own, like our hands fit together,
puzzle piece perfect.
 

My heart beat so loudly against my
ribs, I was absolutely certain she must be able to hear it, my pulse racing
through me and my ribs practically vibrating from the thud of my heart in my
chest.
 
And she did cast me a sidelong
glance, her brows raised, but maybe it was because the air in the car was
getting much colder since my window had been rolled down.
 
I rolled it back up slowly and took a deep
breath.
 

Only people without a pulse would
not
be attracted to Layne O’Connell.
 
She
was funny and sarcastic and ridiculously graceful and intense and more handsome
than my heart (and other body regions) could grasp.
 
There was such a deep, magnetic pull to her, so that your eyes
had to find her in a crowded room and follow her movements because her body
tugged your gaze in like the sun holds earth in orbit.
 

Part of me wanted to tell Layne
that I
was
incredibly attracted to her, and then take it from
there.
 
Part of me wanted to make that
first move.
 
But I wasn’t certain if
Layne was attracted to me—she treated me like everyone else, that I saw.
 
So if she didn’t find me attractive or
return my feelings in any way, shape or form, I really didn’t want to make a
fool of myself in this working relationship.
 

And, let’s be honest, it
was
a
working relationship.
 
I’d been truthful
when I told Tracy my reasons for not exactly pursuing Layne:
 
it would be such a complicated mess if we
did try something out (if, after all, she had feelings for me, too), and then
it didn’t work out, and we were stuck together whether we liked it or not.
 
She, effectively, worked for me, and that
made things so much more complicated than they would normally be.

But there were…other things.
 
Other reasons that I hadn’t told Layne how I
felt about her yet.
 
I couldn’t have put
them into words, exactly, other than the fact that, sometimes, Layne felt
dangerous to me.
 
There were too many
unanswered questions surrounding her.
 

Still, a little mystery can be
incredibly captivating.

I cast Layne a sidelong
glance.
 
She had her chin up, her shades
down, and a wry smile tugging at the corners of her lips.

I couldn’t so much as
look
at
her without my heart flip flopping all over the place, my heartbeat starting to
come a little quicker, and my breath coming a little faster.
 
I promise, I’m not this hopelessly smitten
around most women.
 
And even if I feel
attracted to someone, I’m much more smooth about it, usually.

But when it came to Layne, that all
went out the window.
 

I wondered how much longer I could
go without telling her I was attracted to her.
 

If she kept grabbing my hand like
that, squeezing it, and promising to keep me safe…my best guess was not very long
at all.

Soon after that, we arrived in
Gloucester.

I hadn’t realized how long we’d
been on the road, but it had apparently been an hour or so since we left Boston
proper.
 
For awhile, we’d been on the
highway only surrounded by thick green trees, their branches tossing about
since the storm over the ocean was picking up speed and bringing the wind with
it.
 
But then the trees parted, and the
ocean had come back into view.

I was pretty familiar with
Gloucester, because it’s where my father has one of his biggest shipyards, and
one of his largest seafood plants on the east coast, so he often brought me on
trips he took to them, bringing me into the airport sized packing plant that I
really should have been disgusted by, even as a kid.
 
But the men laughed and whistled while they worked, telling each
other dirty jokes while they through around halves of tuna and crates of
shrimp, and it’s kind of odd to say that shipyards and packing plants are
comforting to a kid…but they had become that way to me.
 

The little seaside town of
Gloucester has been known for its brave fishermen since the pilgrims sailed
over on the Mayflower.
 
It also has the
saddest history of shipwrecks and men lost at sea.
 
One of my father’s own ships, the Pretty Godiva, was lost at sea
about fifteen years ago, full of Gloucester fishermen.
 
Only one man was drowned, the rest were
rescued, but still.
 
Whenever I come
here, see the storm-washed fronts of the houses along the main street that
wraps around the little bay, I’m reminded of what the town has lost.
 

It’s not as bad as all that,
though.
 
Gloucester is a bustling little
town with a thriving tourist industry now.
 
Even though the skies were still threatening inclement weather, big,
gray clouds rolling over the sea, the main street that ran along the bay with
its two famous statues was bustling with tourists.
 

Because of the traffic, we drove
slowly past the two famous statues of Gloucester, one after the other, and I
watched the people clustered around them taking pictures.
 
There were the most people, of course,
around the very recognizable “They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships” statue of
a fisherman in all his rain gear, holding on to a steering wheel for dear life
as an invisible storm threatens his invisible ship.
 
Fewer people, but still a crowd, had gathered around the slightly
less recognizable statue of the woman and her children, waiting for her
fisherman husband to come back from sea.

But Layne wasn’t headed toward the
bay.
 
She turned the car away from it
and kept going along the road that wound up toward Rockport, the next town
over.

“I grew up in Gloucester,” said
Layne suddenly, her voice unusually quiet.
 
I glanced at her in surprise.
 
She was staring out the front window at the red light we were stopped
at, her eyes soft and actually a little misty.
 
“My dad worked in your dad’s packing plant, believe it not, after a
scare out on one of the boats,” said Layne with a soft snort.
 
She accelerated when the light turned green.

“Your father was a fisherman?” I
asked, my curiosity piqued.

“He was on the Pretty Godiva,” said
Layne, casting me a sidelong glance.
 
My
brows rose, too.

“The ship went down in March,” I
said, remembering all of the details as if it was yesterday.
 
I’d been a teenager, and my father had taken
the loss extremely hard.
 
I still
remember him weeping brokenly and openly behind his desk, his face buried in
his hands after he’d had to tell the wife of the fisherman who hadn’t made it,
that he’d been lost at sea.
 
“The ship
went down in March,” I repeated after licking my lips, my mouth suddenly dry,
“the ship sunk completely, and the fishermen aboard had to stay afloat in the
wreckage on the ocean’s surface for six hours before help could get to them
because of how bad the storm was.”

“Yeah,” said Layne curtly, her jaw
working as she cleared her throat.
 
“He
survived that.
 
But it affected him
pretty bad.
 
PTSD, the doctors said.
 
He couldn’t go back out on the boats.
 
So then he went to work at the plant for
your father instead of fishing.
 
The
ocean…I mean, it’s kind of cliché, but it’s true:
 
the ocean was dad’s life.
 
After that, he was never the same.
 
I mean, he still had his sense of humor about stuff, but he started
drinking.”
 
She breathed out for a long
moment through her nose.
 
“He’s gone
now.
 
He died last year.”

“I’m so sorry, Layne,” I said
quietly.
 
I didn’t even realize I was
doing it until my hand was half-way across the space between us, but then I
just went ahead and placed my palm against her arm.

She half-smiled at me as she shook
her head.
 
“No, honestly…it’s all
right.
 
Wherever he is, I’m sure he’s
happier than he was those last few years.
 
He had pretty bad survivor’s guilt.
 
But yeah,” she said, clearing her throat and nodding her chin out the
window at the rows of salt-worn houses.
 
“I grew up here.
 
Down that
street, actually.
 
The little blue house
on the corner.”
 

I looked out the window at the tiny
blue house, some of its shutters missing, and its darker blue door so worn, it
looked like it was original to the house, and hadn’t been repainted since.
 
It looked too small for even two people to
live there comfortably.
 
The street
itself was pretty worn and broken up, potholes and chunks of pavement making it
look hazardous to drive down, and down toward the end of the bend in the street,
there were a couple of kids running in the middle of it, a big black dog tight
on their heels, its long fur straight out behind it as it ran with the
children.

“Anyway,” said Layne with a tight
smile, “I didn’t bring you here to show you my old house, I promise.
 
I have a few tricks up my sleeve yet.
 
I want to show you something.
 
One of my favorite places.”