Page 85 of Price of Angels

But what happened instead shocked her. Michael took one huge step back from her, drawing himself up tall and rigid, his expression smoothing as he fought for control of his temper. Only his eyes evidenced emotion, wide and hot with it.

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple punching in his throat.

Holly waited, and nothing happened. After a long, tense moment of his staring, she realized nothing wasgoingto happen.

“What did you mean,” she said, “when you asked if I’d gotten it out of my system?”

He swallowed again. “Gotten being stubborn about your friend out of your system. I thought maybe you’d come around from your guilty bullshit.”

Holly let out a deep breath and sagged sideways against the counter, tucking her chin down into the borrowed sweatshirt, breathing in the smell of his skin from the fabric. “The girls were talking today, and I overhead them.”

“Bitches,” he muttered.

“They’re not wrong.”

“They are,” he said. “I’d like to see one of them deal with…what you did.”

Had she dealt with it? Was that the way to phrase it?

She didn’t know. She was exhausted suddenly, completely worn out by this conversation, and the assuredness that Michael was seconds away from snapping and backhanding her.

Holly massaged her scalp with both hands. The tears were building still, a sharp pressure at the backs of her eyes.

“What did you mean” – she stared at the toes of his boots; they were damp from walking through the snow – “when you said it was worth something to you?”

She braced herself for any number of painful answers, telling herself it didn’t matter to her, even when it did so acutely.

She wasn’t prepared for the sudden closing of his arms around her, and the shape of his face burying against her hair. This was a different breed of silence, as he crushed her against his chest, one fraught with the same inexpressible tension of the night before, when he’d been beyond speech, when he’d taken her up against the wall.

His heart was a rich throbbing rhythm against her breasts; his breath ruffled her hair. His fingers were curled and hard like claws, and Holly felt a curling in his body, as if he tried to cover her while they stood. The scent and feel of him engulfed her. There was no kitchen, no house, no snowbound Knoxville, only Michael, and his hands in her hair.

“Do you care?” she asked in a shaking whisper against his chest. She couldn’t bring herself to ask it more deeply than that, only repeat, “Do you care?”

He forced her head back, and she had the sense he was infinitely careful in the way he released his anger in that one gesture. She had one glimpse of his face – harsh, narrow, pale and terrible – before his mouth closed over hers.

It was one ferocious, almost cruel kiss, and then his lips, damp and warm from her mouth, touched her neck. He buried his face there, in her throat, his breathing ragged, his fingers wrapped tight against her skull.

Holly blinked at the tears in her eyes and stroked the lean, tense muscles down his spine for long, careful moments.

“You care,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

Oh, God, he cared. He cared, he cared, he cared…

Holly warmed up a stick of butter, mashed it together with dried herbs and some lemon juice, and then smeared it beneath the skin of the chicken, working it into all the joints with determined fingertips. He’d never seen anyone do that before. She cut the green beans in half – she’d insisted on fresh and not canned, and he’d had to bag and weigh the bastards at the store – and cooked them over the stove with garlic. The potatoes were roasted. She was an efficient blur of movement in his kitchen, humming to herself and chattering at him about all the cooking shows she’d watched, because it was always hard for her to sleep, and gave every impression that her depressing life was somehow meaningful for her.

They ate, and outside the snow covered everything.

Now they were sunk deep in the center of the sofa, while the fire he’d built up in the hearth warmed the room, andDie Hardplayed, and the whiskey lulled him down into a cocoon of ochre sensations he wasn’t going to want to crawl out of, once the night was over.

Holly had put one of the couch pillows over his thigh and laid down beside him, curled on her side, her head in his lap. She hadn’t asked, she’d just done it, like it was the most obvious, natural choice of seating arrangements. It was a quiet, brave gesture in its own way, her claiming of intimacy.

It had felt only natural that his hand rest in the curve of her waist. He could feel her breathing, small ribcage lifting up into his hand on every inhale. Steady, calm breathing. She was comfortable. In his house, with him, in this moment.

His club brothers would have laughed to see him like this. They would have been shocked.

His brothers were stupid.

“He’s not going to have a shirt left by the end, is he?” Holly asked.

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