Page 24 of The Auction
“Whosethey?”
He looked at me then and I could almost see it happen. The moonlight that flittered through the back door of the mud room showed his huge pupils. Almost like his eyes were designed to see at night. Then he blinked. And blinked again.
His body language changed then. His shoulders slumped. His hand, the one that had been holding the gun, fell to his side.
“Jules?” he rasped.
Then I understood. It had been a dream. He’d been sleepwalking.
Should I try and take the gun from him?
Definitely not, something told me. Not the way he held it like it was an extension of his hand.
“I think you’re sleepwalking,” I told him. “There’s no one else here in the house.”
“There’s no one here,” he repeated. He blinked a few times and shook his head. “Did I wake you up?”
Did he fucking wake me up? I wanted to slap him across his face after what he put me through. But he was clearly going through something of his own.
“You need to go to bed,” I told him. “And make sure the safety’s on that thing.”
He looked down at his hand as if he was just seeing thegun. In less than a second, he’d not only clicked on the safety but removed the magazine as well.
I took his non gun holding hand and led him back through the kitchen into the living room and off the hallway that led to his bedroom. I didn’t follow him inside, just waited for him to put the gun away in the drawer in the nightstand by his bed.
He was looking down at the floor when he said, “I…sometimes I sleepwalk.”
“We’ll talk about it in the morning,” I said.
Because this was a new sort of fucked up situation.
“I lock my door from the inside,” he said, still not looking at me. “Usually by the time I’ve figured out how to open it, I wake myself up.”
But tonight I’d let him fall asleep on the couch.
“We’ll talk about it in the morning. Go back to sleep.”
But he didn’t move. Just stood there, in his briefs. All hard muscles and sharp angles.
It occurred to me he had the body of a highly trained athlete.
Or, like he’d once told me, an elite killer.
“Night,” I said, for lack of any other words.
Yeah, this was going to be one heck of a conversation tomorrow.
But as I made my way back up to my room, locking the door behind me, although I wasn’t sure why I bothered as it was basically zero deterrent to a man with his kind of skills, it occurred to me that he’d truly been ready to kill anyone who had dared to step inside this house.
They come for what’s mine…
Was I included in what he considered his?
The next morningI came downstairs to the smell of coffee. This wasn’t unusual. Creed was typically up before me and always had a pot of coffee still half full on the warmer, ready for me.
Except normally, he was already dressed for the day, usually without enough warm clothing for what the weather was outside, and headed out to the barn to start the day, leaving me to some morning privacy.
However, this morning he was sitting at the kitchen table, in a pair of sweats, a chain around his neck and nothing else. His massive chest and six pack was on display for all the world to see.
