Page 60 of Deliver Me

He reached for her hand, wrapping his fingers around hers and caressing the knuckles with his thumb. “My mother figured it out for us.”

She looked up, teeth nipping down on the bottom lip that he still wanted to run his tongue over. She deserved more than what he had to give, she deserved everything, but knowing that she would have been willing to live with so much less made him all the more eager to give it to her. “Lilah?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

“I talked to Amy this morning and apparently my grandfather left me a trust fund that Mom never bothered to tell me about. Now that I’m an adult and out of prison, it’s mine.”

“She was going to let you rot without a lawyer when you had money that was rightfully yours?” There was a bitter spark in her eyes and her mouth was pressed in a thin and hostile line.

“Amy was just as shocked when Lilah asked her to pass along the information to me, but I’m honestly not surprised. Mother doesn’t see the world in shades of gray. It’s either right or it’s wrong. I’ve almost always been wrong as far as she was concerned.”

“That’s not how a mother should behave,” Mia said hotly. “She should be on your side, helping you, protecting you. If she had been, things might have been different.”

“They might,” he agreed. “But they weren’t and now I’m out and I’ve got you and my money to take care of you.” He threw back his head and laughed. “We’ve got a trust fund, baby!”

Chapter Twenty-Four

It was late afternoon when she parked the car. She said the apartment complex was the best she could afford on her meager paycheck this close to campus and the paint on the buildings was peeling at the edges of the small balconies. “It’s not much but there’s a pool and a little workout room that almost never has anyone else in it.”

No one looked up as they passed the pool where blue water glimmered, and it was strange how out of place he felt in a world that continued to move along without him when the prison doors had clanged shut.

She watched the line of his gaze. “It’s too hot to do much outside right now, but we could definitely go swimming if you want.”

The idea that he had the freedom to do that was almost enough to steal the breath from his chest. “I’ll need to get a bathing suit,” he said as he followed her into the breezeway of one of the buildings and made a mental note of the large number on the side, so he didn’t get lost if he had to go outside for anything. When was the last time he had to worry about remembering or finding his way around someplace that wasn’t familiar?

She laughed, her voice echoing in the small space as they climbed the staircase. “You’re going to need everything. Pants and shirts, socks, underwear. I already let my boss know I’d be out for the rest of the week while you got settled so we can go shopping.”

She fit the key into the lock and pushed the door open with her shoulder. She’d said that the apartment was theirs, but she’s been living here alone for months, and he was hesitant as he followed her inside.

The door opened to a tiny living room on the left and a minuscule eat-in kitchen on the right. There was a single hallway that he assumed led to the bedroom and bathroom and a sliding glass door that revealed a balcony that he doubted was large enough for the two of them to both stand on at the same time.

She hung her keys on a hook by the door, reaching around behind him to flick the locks as she toed off her shoes. “This is it,” she said, spreading her arms wide as she began to walk, chattering about the apartment and expecting him to follow. The living room was tidy, the small space taken up by a small dark blue couch with a low coffee table and a flat screen TV on the opposite wall—but that wasn’t what caught his attention as he looked around the room.

“The couch is a little small for you, probably,” she said, evaluating it skeptically as he stood next to it, “but we can get a bigger one when we move—”

“Mia,” he interrupted, pointing at the wall behind the couch. “You kept all of these?”

His art lined the wall, arranged neatly in rows of thin black frames, all grouped together with others that had similar themes and colors so that it blended from black and white on the top right to a furious explosion of color on the bottom left.

She nodded, tipping her head to look at her arrangement. “There’s more in the bedroom and the hallway,” she confirmed,taking his hand and leading him through the rest of the apartment, showing him the art she’d hung and the places where she kept pictures of them together in frames on the dresser beside her bed. The worry about invading space that belonged to her faded in the face of just how much of him was already here.

“Do you like it?” she asked, standing in her bedroom and drumming her fingers on her thigh. She was nervous, he realized, afraid that he wouldn’t like her home or the things that were important to her.

“I love it,” he said, smiling as she relaxed with a nearly imperceptible sigh.

His eyes roamed the rest of the space and landed on the bed that sat beneath the room’s lone window. She’d brought him here with the expectation that he would stay, and he thought—hoped—that she meant for him to share that bed with her. If not right away, then at some point. Her letters and the phone calls they’d shared over the months that had passed had been heated, as explicit as they could be under the circumstances, but he knew about Mia’s upbringing and her faith. They’d never talked about it, another thing he’d assumed wrongly that they’d have more time to work out between them, but he knew that she’s always intended to wait until she was married, and he suspected that would still be true now, even if she did bring him here.

“I was just wondering” he mumbled, raking his hand through his hair. “Where I’m sleeping?”

“Where do you want to sleep?”

“Wherever you are,” he said honestly, deciding that it was better to be damned for the truth than a lie.

The tension drained from her shoulders. “Yeah?”

“I want you,” he said, leaning down until he could sweep his lips over hers, the barest brush of skin with the heaviest hint of promise, “but I want you to be sure and we’re not married yet.”

“Yet?” She tipped her face up to look at him, brows lifted in surprise.

“Yet,” he agreed. “I know how you feel about that, and I love you too much for you to think we made a mistake.”

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