Page 138 of Hold Me Until Morning

“Never,” Lolly told her.

The old lady started to shuffle into the kitchen, but I pushed from the island. “You sit. I’ll handle breakfast.”

Surprise expanded her eyes, shrewdness lighting her expression, with this knowing as she reached out and curled her hand around my bicep. “Ah, I think that I might have been right about you.”

“That he’s the strongest, most tallest man with the biggest muscles in the whole wide world?” Maddie piped in from the side.

“That’s right, Maddie…” Her gaze twinkled. “He might just be strong enough.”

Disquiet gusted.

A sense coming in from the recesses of my mind, from the instincts seeded in my spirit.

It warned things were nastier than imagined.

Hailey had let me peek through the barriers last night, though the details were still vague and distorted to the sordid secrets that thrashed behind the barrier where she kept them concealed.

She’d given me a peek behind the veil last night, but I knew firsthand how depraved those kinds of souls went.

Regret throbbed from the vat of immorality I’d kept inside myself.

My own dirty secret.

Was I any fucking different than that monster who was hunting her now?

Maddie took my hand and looked up at me. “Do you know all the important things about me, too, Mr. Cody?” she asked.

Shit.

I fucking had to be.

Had to prove I was better. Be fucking better.

Because it was my whole heart that clutched as the little girl looked up at me with so much trust it grounded me to the spot.

Made me sure I was purposed to be right there.

I squeezed her tiny hand back. “Not yet, Maddie, but I’m going to do my best to learn every single one of them.”

THIRTY

HAILEY

My eyes blinked open to the glittering light that streaked in through the window and to the sound of muted voices echoing from the other side of my bedroom wall.

A low, rumbly drone, another that was high-pitched and precious, and the hoarse rasp of my grandmother’s. The quiet conversation was intermingled with the sporadic giggle that flooded through the air and nudged me from sleep.

I inhaled a deep breath and stretched out like a kitten in my bed, the covers still warm from the heat of his body.

My limbs were heavy, leaden with satisfied, satiated exhaustion, though my stomach and chest were light.

The quivering of wings that flapped and fluttered and flitted.

My senses awash in ripples of comfort.

With this rightness that could so easily sink all the way to my bones and become part of my marrow.

A shriek of laughter penetrated the atmosphere, and I forced myself to climb out of bed.

---