Page 51 of Stealthy Seduction
To be in his arms. To be safe.
The sound bursting past her lips was soft but might as well have been a gunshot for how Hudson reacted.
He hooked his arms around her body, wrapping her close as he turned toward the bed.
When he laid her on the mattress and tucked her against his chest, she realized just how much she was shaking.
“Hudson…” She curled her fingers into his chest, bunching his shirt, clinging to the one thing left that seemed solid in this world.
She broke. “I don’t understand any of this. I don’t understand anything anymore.” She shook her head, and his broad palm came up to cradle it. She sucked in a breath, filling her senses with her lover’s masculine scent mixed with a crisper tang, like leather.
When she shook her head, her nose brushed against his throat. “I thought I moved past all this fear. I was actually leaving my house again. I was ready to work again.”
“Christ, Izzy.” He pressed his lips to the spot between her eyes with a heated pressure.
She wished he could erase the memories from her with a simple kiss. “Now I’m being hunted because I was part of the event that stopped the militia from intercepting a bomb…that then killed the mother of a man who later became a terrorist?”
His breath rushed over her hair. “That’s the gist of it, yeah.”
She snorted, the sound bordering on hysteria.
Hudson cupped her face in his big hands. “Izzy, look at me.”
Just meeting his stare stripped away a layer of her panic.
“Breathe with me. Ready? Take a breath in.”
She did.
“One, two, three,” he counted. “Now let it out. One, two, three. Again, honey. In…”
For several minutes, he guided her through just taking one breath at a time. She’d been through half a dozen meditation workshops, but focusing on her breathing had never worked so well to calm her down.
She tumbled into the depths of his eyes. Each little steely gray ray grounded her in the present. There was something hypnotic about the way the colors shifted—pewter near his pupils, lighter silver at the edges, with faint specks of pale blue that caught the lighting he’d switched on over the bed.
She could lose herself in that steady gaze, let it wash away the questions and horrible certainty that her nightmare was far from over.
Hudson drew the pad of his thumb across her lips, and she released the breath she’d been holding in a puff. “Good. Better?”
“A little.”
He slipped his hand around her nape, his long fingers teasing into her hair. “I realize this is a lot to process. I just want you to know that you have time. You’re safe here.”
A shiver rolled up her spine, and she curled closer to him.
The thud of her heart began to slow to a softer thump…that turned into a patter.
His chest rose and fell against her cheek in a steady rhythm that seemed to reset her frantic heartbeat. His body heat was a shelter from the storm raging in her mind.
She’d spent three years battling to find peace within herself, to be her own anchor when the memories threatened to pull her under. But this—being held by somebody who was so familiar with danger, who faced it and survived it—felt different.
This was allowing herself to be vulnerable with someone strong enough to carry the weight of her fear without breaking under it.
Somewhere between their first poker game and this moment, Hudson Steele had become more than just her protector.
He’d become the person she thought about when she woke up and the last before she drifted to sleep at night.
And that realization scared her almost as much as the masked figure on the billboards, because caring about someone this much meant having something precious to lose, and she wasn’t sure she was brave enough for that kind of risk.
