Page 19 of Secrets Within Us

And clearly, I was a fucking idiot. Which was why I was still downstairs and she was in my bed, alone.

Standing in the dark living room, I knew Dev was going to stay up with her all night, betraying me. I made my way to the liquor cabinet for a nightcap, hoping it would help me drift off to sleep.

When I went for the whiskey though, it was gone, and so was the glass I’d planned on using.

I turned and looked up at the railing to the loft to see if I could see or hear anything from her, but it was silent.

There was no way she was sleeping, not after taking my best whiskey and dog upstairs, leaving me thirsty and lonely.

Fuck, my life was what country songs fucking thrived on.

So I grabbed another bottle and forcefully closed the cupboard, hoping she knew I was angry, and went to the couch.

I didn’t even bother with the glass and drank straight from the bottle, and after about twenty minutes I felt the familiar warmth that the alcohol left fall over my body, numbing everything around the edges.

I looked up from the couch to the loft once more, hoping to glimpse her, but she never came to the edge for me, no matter how hard I tried beckoning her with my mind.

The house was dead silent and my drunk mind was finally relaxed when a sound drifted over the edge of the loft to me. It was so soft, at first I thought I’d imagined it. I leaned forward, trying to focus on what it was, trying to get the alcohol to clear for me to pinpoint it.

And then I figured out what it was, and a wave of regret washed over me, wishing I could turn back time by thirty seconds and warn myself not to listen.

She had just figured out what kind of asshole I really was, and that realization made me feel like the biggest one in the world.

The noise was that of her cries, muffled in the pillow, followed by Dev’s sympathetic whine.

I remained on the couch, listening to her cries for the next two hours until she fell silent. I forced myself to do so, needing to hear them, to feel like the piece of trash I was, so that I wouldn’t be tempted to give her any affection again.

It wasn’t fair to her; she didn’t deserve my inability to want her without my guilt and shame tainting it.

She was the definition of perfection. I knew almost nothing about her, but I could tell she was perfect. She was gorgeous, easily the most beautiful woman I’d ever met before, even through the bruises, that was easy to see.

And more than that, she was kind.

She was the type of woman who wouldn’t hurt a fly and was so soft-spoken that when she yelled at me earlier; it shocked me senseless. She was kind, soft, and pure, but she also had a fire in her soul. And that fire burned when I treated her poorly, and a part of me felt pride in my chest, knowing she didn’t let anyone put her down or belittle her.

At least until whoever got his hands on her and beat her so badly, she ended up here with me. It still bothered me immensely that she wouldn’t tell me what happened to her, but if I thought about it enough, I found I couldn’t blame her.

It had to have been a random attack.

Perhaps a carjacking or something.

I imagined someone carjacked and kidnapped her, beat her, and then dumped her somewhere.

It had to be something random like that. No one local would have done that to her, of that I was positive.

But as I laid my head back against the cushions and stared at the railing to my bedroom, I couldn’t shake the feeling that what happened wasn’t over for her just yet. And that made me angry because she had been through enough. If there was any way for me to stop more harm from coming to her, I had to try. But I had to get her to open up to me to do that.

My body was antsy and jumpy even after the copious amounts of booze I’d forced down my throat. My hands itched to feel her skin against them again. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees as I tried to remind myself of all the reasons to stay away from her. But soon, I lost the battle and without even thinking about it; I stood up and my feet led me to the stairs.

I climbed the stairs, telling myself the entire way that I’d just check on her and make sure she was alright, then return to the couch. When I looked around the corner of the bedroom wall, I could make out the shape of her curled under the covers from the glow of the fire downstairs.

Her tiny female shape was tucked in deep, surrounded by blankets and pillows in my bed.

In my room.

In my home.

It stirred a sense of possessiveness inside of me, waking up the protector inside of me that I’d let go dormant for so long.

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