Chapter 21 #2
In reality, I’d simply conditioned myself to eat as much as possible as quickly as possible, since I typically didn’t have much time to do anything else.
And since Gill-bert was the only one around to judge me, I hadn’t thought anything of it.
Now that I’d reminded myself how much Colt and I weren’t anything more than coworkers, whatever self-control I’d been using to pace myself could crawl back where it came from.
No sense trying to convince him I was desirable or demure or anything but what I was.
I made my way back to the bed, avoiding the Colt-like shadowy blob on the edge of it. Apparently not enough, though, since my fingers still brushed his as I crawled onto the mattress.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, pulling away even as flames licked up my veins from the contact.
“Why are you afraid of thunderstorms?” he asked, the question bursting from him like he could no longer keep a lid on it.
I considered denying it, maybe brushing him off.
But when another thunderclap made my heart stop, I changed my mind.
He had eyes. Beautiful, nutmeg-brown ones that saw way too much.
And with the power out, the wired listening devices in the house would be blessedly useless for the first time since Gauthier’s thugs installed them.
These kinds didn’t have a backup battery, and if they did, the raging storm was loud enough to distort our voices.
“I’ll tell you if you tell me what you were smiling about,” I hedged, scooting further up the bed until I could sit against the headrest. “You know, when you supposedly weren’t laughing at my phobias.”
Colt hummed thoughtfully and then—shockingly—he followed me. The mattress shifted and caved with his weight as he crept toward me, the shuffling and faint squeaking continuing until he’d situated himself against the headrest, too. Only a foot away, judging from his shadowy outline.
“You really want to know?” he asked. “It’s not as scandalous as you’re likely imagining.”
I snorted. “You are many, many things, Colt, but scandalous has never been one of them.”
He didn’t respond for a beat, and, based on the electricity tingling against my skin, I was the lucky recipient of his full attention.
“Would you like me to be?” he asked, so softly I barely heard it over the wind and rain pelting the house.
I didn’t know if he asked out of curiosity or if he’d intended to send my mind cycling through forbidden fantasies of him, but he’d accomplished it regardless.
Maybe it was my own stupidity, maybe it was the fact that—for the first time during our assignment—we were actually sharing the bed our married personas supposedly slept in every night.
Or maybe it was a combination of the two, toying with my desires like a puppeteer.
Sending the sensation of his lips against me like a phantom’s kiss.
Lightning flashed, and I shook the fantasies away. “I want you to be you, Colt.” I swallowed thickly and rubbed the fabric of my shirt between my fingers. “We have to do enough pretending as it is.”
Another weighty pause settled between us. His familiar scent tickled my nose, tempting in its softness. Its promise of more, if only I’d come closer.
“Last I checked, I drive you mad by being myself,” he finally said, a hint of humor in his voice.
He drove me mad in every conceivable way. Sure, his neatness and routines and other idiosyncrasies frustrated me at first, but I didn’t mind them so much anymore. I almost even… liked them. Appreciated them. But everything else about him? That was what really got me.
His discipline. His thoughtfulness. The fact that, for being so predictable, he somehow never ceased to surprise me.
He was a puzzle I couldn’t solve. Like someone had taken the pieces from three different jigsaws, shaken them up, and left me to sort through them without any photo to show me what the final product should be.
And the fact that I hadn’t solved it—that I wanted to so badly but couldn’t? That drove me mad.
I wanted to know all of those pieces. I wanted to know how his voice sounded at five thirty in the morning right after he woke up.
I wanted to know how the stubble he shaved off every morning would feel on his cheeks.
Against my skin. I wanted to know what made him choose to do undercover work, what inspired him, what he’d wanted to become before addiction ripped its sticky claws through his life.
I wanted to know it all. Fit the pieces together and see Colt in his entirety.
And perhaps what drove me most mad of all?
I wanted him to want to solve my puzzle, too.
Not because leaving the pieces scattered on the table bothered him, but because he wanted to see the final picture.
He was the person most capable of doing so, the one I wanted to be seen by the most, and the fact that nothing I could do would make him want to do that burned.
Rather than admit any of that, though, I only managed a small smile. “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”
Another roll of thunder filled the space between us. It was still too close to the previous one for my comfort, but they were spacing out. In theory, that meant we were past the worst of it.
“I was thinking about the day we met,” Colt murmured. He huffed a soft laugh. “I remembered thinking how you were a hurricane personified. Or a thunderstorm, even. So, to find out that you’re afraid of them…”
I smiled, shifting to look at him. I couldn’t make out many details until my eyes adjusted to the darkness, but it was comforting to know he was here. That he chose to be here. “So I’m basically afraid of myself. I see now.”
“I think we all are, to some extent.”
I arched an eyebrow, only wincing a little when thunder rumbled outside. “Yeah? What are you afraid of about yourself?”
He hummed thoughtfully. I expected him to deflect, maybe change the topic or direct it back to me. But to my surprise, he quietly admitted, “That I’ll keep getting in my own way.”
But before I could ask what he meant by that, he gently nudged my leg. “Your turn. What are you afraid of about yourself—the thunder or the lightning?”
I chuckled, unsure which parts of myself fell under which category.
The truth, that I broke myself into too many pieces—combined too many jigsaws—that no one would want to take the time to put them together, sat on the tip of my tongue.
My work persona. My disaster of a personal life.
My cover identity. All pieces of me, but never the full picture.
But maybe what I really feared most was admitting that. Wanting that. Because what I said instead was, “the lightning. It’s messier.”
“And yet it’s the most beautiful thing about thunderstorms,” he added quietly.
I wished then that the power would come on, even if for only a moment. Just long enough to search his face, root out the subtle cues, excavate the truth from behind the chiseled stone planes. Anything to know if his words were more than what they presented themselves to be.
But the lights didn’t come on. Darkness and the weighty, electric tension in the room were the only witnesses. No one listening in. No pretenses, no covers. Just the two of us dropping our masks in the safety of twilight.
“When I was in kindergarten, we went on a field trip to the zoo,” I said, finally breaking the spell woven through the room.
“While we were there, a tornado hit. I remember running to the bus as soon as the dark clouds and wind started, asking my chaperone to take me back home. They told me everything would be fine, even while tree branches were flying through the air. Our whole class was eventually rounded up, but by then it wasn’t safe to drive a bus full of five-year-olds through the storm, so we all went to the basement of the visitor’s center. ”
The gloom and foreboding rock in my gut had cemented themselves in my memory even now, years after the event.
The basement filled with crying kids while a tornado touched down nearby.
The howling wind shaking the bus, bending trees, breaking signs.
I’d wondered if the animals would be okay. If we would be okay.
I shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “I know it’s not the most traumatic thing to experience, but it freaked me out enough that I hid with my sister in her basement bedroom for every thunderstorm I could after that.”
“I can only imagine how terrifying that would’ve been,” he murmured. “Your family was probably worried about you, too.”
“My group’s chaperone let us use her cellphone to call our parents and let them know we were okay, thankfully. But still.”
“Still,” he echoed. Another boom crashed around us. “So you really hid in your sister’s room? Even when you were a teenager?”
I chuckled. When he put it like that, it sounded absurd. But emotions often were, weren’t they? “I got better about hiding my reasons for being there, for the record. But I think she always knew I didn’t want to be alone, and she was just too kind to say anything about it.”
A pang of homesickness hit me like a truck. Not for a place, but a person. What was Dekker up to right now? What daily special had she created at her bakery today? I ached to call her, to hear her voice, to ask her for advice.
“You miss her, don’t you?” Colt asked.
There he went, reading my mind again. A dangerous pastime if ever there were one.
I cracked a small smile. “Is it that obvious?”
“Not to everyone else, I’m sure.”
“Only you and your superior observation skills, right?” I teased. It was odd how quickly what would have been a snide remark aimed at him had turned into a lighthearted one.
“Something like that,” he chuckled, the sound nearly lost to the storm.
“You looked at the photo on your desk of the two of you a lot. Similar to the way you look at the daffodils outside, but less… sad . And the way you talk about her” —the mattress shifted slightly, and I could picture him shrugging— “you really care.”