Page 25 of Hold Me Until Morning

God, she was such a schemer.

But she didn’t know. I couldn’t expect her to. She thought she was nudging me in the right direction when that direction was riddled with potholes and dead ends.

I silently counted to ten while they ambled up the walkway, and I waited until I heard the front door slam before I turned my attention to the man who was currently moving boxes out of the way to get to the couch.

I inhaled a shaky breath, trying to form some semblance of cool when I felt like the foundation I was trying to build was already crumbling beneath me. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Mr. Cooper.”

He lifted a box over his head to place onto the top of five others he’d already stacked against the wall. The movement caused his tee to ride up over the waistband of his jeans. It revealed a swath of packed, chiseled abdomen, hip bones peeking out.

It should be a felony for one single man to be that hot.

Me even noticing was the true crime.

“Helping out a neighbor, is all.”

I huffed as I hoisted a leg up so I could climb into the bed of the truck. “And I keep telling you I don’t need your help. I have movers coming this weekend.”

“That’s not for four days.” He kept moving my things around, freeing the couch that three minutes ago had been buried.

“Which is not going to hurt a thing. We have our beds. That’s all we need,” I said as I edged deeper into the truck.

He turned on me faster than I ever could have anticipated.

His proximity froze me to the spot. The man towered, so tall his head nearly touched the top of the trailer.

Nothing but a heaping stack of muscle and brawn and cruel intentions.

Only right then, he wasn’t sporting that smirk, and something intense dimmed his grin just like it’d done when he’d touched my chin last night.

The same as I’d thought I’d sensed in his voice when he’d been talking to me in the stables.

He angled down, too close.

My stomach twisted and my knees quaked.

“I’m not sure about you, Ms. Wagner, but I’d prefer to keep that smile on your daughter’s face rather than disappointing her. Especially when it doesn’t cost me a thing to put it there.”

I warred, my voice haggard with the way the air had gone dense, the oxygen too thick to breathe.

“She needs to learn that not everything is easy. That sometimes we have to wait. That sometimes things are hard and she’s not always going to get her way.”

“I’m sure life is going to teach her that lesson just fine.” His teeth grated when he said it.

I got stuck there, by the pain that suddenly roiled in those gold-fired eyes, a dam opening and something I was sure he normally kept hidden gushing out.

I wondered if he could see to the depths of mine.

If it was real. This understanding that passed between us.

The truth that I would do anything to protect my daughter from all those things. From the pain and the wounds and the hurts, thinking that maybe I could prepare her for them, and when she understood they were coming, they might not sting so bad.

Or maybe I somehow foolishly thought if she experienced small ones, tiny knicks of disappointment, it would keep her from the gashes that cut so deep they’d never heal.

Maybe…maybe he did because he murmured, “As far as I’m concerned, we take the good when it’s presented to us because there’s going to be plenty of bad shit to come along. So how about you let me do the simple job of taking this couch inside your house, then you and your kid can snuggle up on it and watch a show tonight.”

I couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t speak.

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