Page 7 of Fighting For You
But what would that do aside from eliciting yet another one of his non-responses and give him something else to judge me about? Not that I cared if he judged me, but I wanted him doing it out of my space, and there’d be no such distance between us for the next eighteen-ish hours.
The crisp mountain air hit my face, and I gulped in a calming breath. I’d never get over the dry air here. I’d lived in a lot of places growing up as my mom moved place to place chasing jobs to keep food on the table. I’d spent most of my military career in the South and finally the last eleven years in North Carolina. I hadn’t ever lived west of the Mississippi, and now that I did? I had no plans to venture back to the swamp-like summers of the South and East.
Give me skin-splittingly dry winters and cooling-air-in-the-shade summers all day, every day. Add to that the glorious variation in fall colors as opposed to the last place I lived that was ninety percent pine trees, and I could hardly love it more.
A grumble alerted me to Beast’s presence, and I turned in time to see him nudge the door of the trunk closed, the straps of both our bags looped in his giant left hand.
“I can carry my own bag,” I said quietly, not wanting any chance of being overheard.
“I’m aware you’re capable.” He moved to my door and set a hand on it, everything about his expression impatient.
Taking the silent cue and choosing not to comment on the miracle of him using multiple complete sentences in the last few minutes, I grabbed my purse, shoving the tablet into it, then raised my brows at him. With zero change in his expression, he pushed the door closed, then strode past me to the sidewalk. I followed quickly, uninterested in trailing in his broody wake.
When his hand brushed against mine, I jumped and leaned away. He stopped, exhaled a gusty sigh so full of exasperation I could practicallyseeit, then pinned me with his gaze. Without looking away, he grasped my wrist with his warm, rough fingers and waited. I didn’t jerk away like I had earlier, stubborn to the end, and though he didn’t move a muscle, I sensed his approval.
Which didnotmatter to me.
Then his hand slipped down and laced our fingers together. It should’ve been uncomfortable, his massive digits knitted with my comparatively delicate ones, but it actually felt pretty natural.
In an alternate universe where we hadn’t lost everything but enmity between us, it might’ve even felt… good.
He straightened and began walking without a word,and I didn’t speak because… what would I say? He wasn’t holding my hand because he wanted to, and I definitely didn’t want it either. He did it because we were here to present a united front as a loving couple arriving to celebrate our anniversary. The contact had me inwardly squirming, squiggly lines looping around in my belly like they’d fallen off a page. Based on the way his jaw flexed under the longer than usual beard he was sporting, he wasn’t loving this either.
But as he guided us inside and up to the reception desk, we were greeted by friendly hotel staff who beamed at us, evidently just delighted to see we’d arrived. They called us by our cover name—Mr. and Mrs. Hanson—and prepared our cards. They congratulated us on a happy five-year anniversary and told us our room was ready.
“Can we take your bags, Mr. Hanson?” Jerry the bellhop asked.
“Thank you, Jerry, but I’ll get them. If I don’t make myself useful, I might not get another five years.” Beast winked at the man who chuckled and nodded good-naturedly, like the joke had landed and I, the shrewish woman at his left, would leave a man for not carrying our bags.
His voice speaking such congenial words should’ve sounded like a record scratch. It should’ve been discordant and odd, but the idea that this Mr. Hanson was the counterpart to mine, that I was acting as his wife, made the sharp lines in my head go fuzzy.
Of course they did, because everything with him was messy and muddled, and it was all his fault.
Plus, I hated little more than the sour stereotypes of the ball and chain or the nagging wife and of course that’d been his charming,haha don’t let the wife ruin our funjoke. Cueeye roll my mother used to warn me about getting stuck like that.
Maybe my dislike of the drag-you-down wife joke came down to having had a relationship that crashed and burned through no fault of my own but that had, when I allowed myself to remember it honestly, contained a lot of that dynamic. Not to mention the fun of finally accepting the truth that my former fiancé had never wanted to get married and had only gone along with an engagement because I’d expected it…cool.Fun combo.
However, I pointedly did not allow myself to remember these things because I didn’t hate myself.Anymore.
Either way, I shotMr. Hansona look.
His giant paw found my lower back—another thing that a different person in another life might’ve enjoyed—and he ushered me toward the elevator. That fictional person in a different universe might relish the warmth of his hand pressed to the curve of her spine or the sheer bliss of his large hand covering so much surface area. Said person might even imagine the absence of material between the rough pads of his fingers and the soft skin of her back, or anticipate the slide of his palms over her curves, hungry and wanting in a way that made her stomach drop.
Cheers to the multiverse—I’d pour one out for the poor sap stuck in that version of the story at dinner.
When the doors swung closed, he let it drop and straightened, almost like he couldn’t find a comfortable way to stand still.
“Quite a performance, Mr. Hanson.”
His eyes cut to mine, but he said nothing.
Fine. He didn’t have to. We didn’t want the staff touching our bags because A, we were only staying one night and B, they contained a few little gadgets that wouldhelp us gain access to locked doors and do other nifty things around their property we didn’t want them aware of.
When the elevator opened, he placed a hand over the door as I walked through, then followed me down the hallway to our room.
Ourroom.
Because we were undercover as a married couple. And we’d need to stay in this suite because it was the same suite Jenna Halter would use when she came next month. We’d check every angle, every part of it, for security risks. We’d outline every possible place a hidden camera could be tucked away, then we’d move out from there—access points to the floor, the building, the property itself. After what she’d been through as her fame skyrocketed along with her security risks, we’d take nothing for granted in terms of her safety.
