Chapter 15 – Janelle
Chapter Fifteen
Janelle
When we’re done, Zeb takes me back inside.
The girl working at the front desk stays crouched beneath it until Zeb leads her out and interrogates her about whether she called the cops or not.
She tells him that she worked for someone named either Oska or Husky…
I’m not sure if I was hearing everything clearly because the gunshots honestly nearly blew out my eardrums. Zeb doesn’t seem as shaken up as I am.
“We’re close enough to Wyatt that I can get him to bring a crew out,” Zeb tells the front desk girl. “Are you working all night?”
“No. There was someone coming to take over later.”
“Call your replacement and tell her not to come in. I need you to work a double shift tonight, I’ll pay you three days wages extra.”
“I know how this works,” she says. “Sadly.”
“Right,” Zeb says. “Need a cigarette?”
“I wouldn’t mind one.”
“Don’t run off on me,” Zeb says. “It would be my pleasure to hunt you down.”
“I have bills to pay, Mr. Blackwood. I wouldn’t run off.”
“Smart girl.”
The “smart girl” goes to have her smoke. Zeb comes back around the front desk and kisses the top of my forehead.
“I need you to take a good shower for me, then we’ll hit the road.”
“What will you be doing?” I ask him. I don’t want Zeb to leave my side, but I’m terrified to admit it, honestly.
There’s something about what happened out there that scrambled my brain and I don’t know what to do next.
Everything just seems to escalate when I’m around him, but when I think of exactly what happened, he somehow doesn’t seem like the villain.
It just seems like he’s making the best choices he can under stress.
I don’t know how the hell this ended up with me killing multiple people.
I don’t even know what to tell Rana at this point.
I have to call her back. Not right away, but I’ll have to tell her about what happened without telling her that I joined a man I just met on a murder spree.
Zeb finally answers my question, after a painfully long silence where I find myself staring uncomfortably long into his pale blue eyes. “Cleaning up. Getting my men out here.”
I don’t mean to cast doubt on his plan, but my heart thumps nervously at the reminder that just outside the front door of this motel, we have five dead bodies. “Your men live closer than the cops?”
Zeb reaches out and touches my lower lip with his thumb.
I shiver as he touches me, but even then I don’t assume anything romantic about him or his touch.
We’ve slept in the same room for long enough now that if Zeb felt any all-consuming lust towards me, he would have acted on it before now, and it wouldn’t be something this simple.
Still, his touch has the unfortunate impact of sending a nervous shiver down my spine.
I can’t stop looking at the dark, murderous expression still on his face, like he’s still in the middle of a battlefield.
Despite that, I feel safe under his gaze, like when he looks at me all he wants to do is protect me. He’s just willing to kill to do that.
“Shower,” Zeb mutters. “That’s all I need you to worry about right now.”
It feels good to have hot water running down my back.
I know I should expect Zeb to return, but I don’t expect him to get back so quickly.
Maybe I’m too numb from what happened that I don’t notice how much time passes.
I hear Zeb’s footsteps getting closer to the bathroom door and I remember that I didn’t lock the bathroom door before climbing into the shower.
I hope Zeb doesn’t have the sense to push the bathroom door open but – he does.
I flinch when I hear the door open, but Zeb doesn’t let that panic last because he announces himself within seconds of entering the room.
“I thought I would come check on you now that everything is under control…”
He gently closes the door behind him, before I hear his footsteps lead him farther into the bathroom.
“Sorry. I hope you don’t mind me intruding,” Zeb says.
I hear a belt unbuckling and I freeze beneath the hot water.
Part of me wants to peel the shower curtain back and look at him to see if he’s really getting naked with me right here in the shower, but I don’t want to see Zeb’s bare dick right now.
Has he lost his mind? I don’t hear him anymore, which means he must be naked as the day he was born coming towards my shower. I consider squirting the shampoo in his eyes, but when Zeb slowly peels the shower curtain back, the only expression on his face is pure concern.
“My clothes are covered in blood,” he says. “Sorry for the indecency.”
I don’t know what part of him to look at first, to my embarrassment.
He has a lot more blood covering his face, and lots of dirt.
He smells very strongly of sweat, and he definitely has a sunburn.
There’s also the fact that he’s naked. And when my eyes inadvertently drop between his legs for just a second, I notice something… horrifying.
He’s huge. Enormous. It’s the biggest one that I’ve ever seen, honestly.
My eyes snap nervously back up to Zeb’s.
If he noticed me looking at his cock, he doesn’t mention it out loud.
I want to ask him if he has to get in here with that big thing swinging around between his legs, but Zeb doesn’t give me the opportunity to do anything like that.
We barely have any room in this shower. He towers over me and if I hadn’t just experienced what I did outside, maybe I would have enjoyed his closeness, but I take a sharp breath in, totally claustrophobic.
“Did you get clean?” Zeb asks, examining me closely. I’m wet, but there’s no soap on my body. My hair sticks to my neck and the bathroom has a nice, steamy atmosphere. It’s cozy here in the bathroom, unlike the hot, vicious desert.
“I haven’t been in here that long,” my voice responds hazily.
“I’ve been gone for an hour.”
I was right… I did disassociate in the shower, losing all my sense of time. Zeb takes water from the showerhead over his body, but then he takes the white motel room washcloth and lathers it in soap.
“I’ll clean you up,” he says. “If you don’t want me touching any part of your body, just hit me.”
“Will that make you stop?” I ask him, suspicious that Zeb has any intention of stopping once he gets his mind on touching me. He’s already so close and so naked that it makes me nervous. I’m too scared to look down at his dick searching for further evidence of his arousal.
“Yes,” he says. “I know I put you through a lot.”
There’s surprising softness in Zeb’s voice that I didn’t expect.
Softness that doesn’t completely reflect the steel-eyed man who commanded me to shoot men bleeding out on the ground in front of me.
He detects my shakiness, and I hate that I’m so vulnerable with him, even if I can’t control it.
My lower lip trembles completely and I drop my gaze to Zeb’s hands, watching him massage the soap on the bleached washcloth into a thick lather.
“I worried that I pushed you too far.”
“Did you leave those bodies–”
“No,” he interrupts. “I told you, Janelle. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“I’m not a criminal.”
He laughs. “I know that. I could tell from looking at you. Arm.”
Zeb gestures for me to hand out my arm for him to clean.
I’m covered in… I don’t even want to know, but I suspect it’s a mixture of dirt, sweat, blood, and another gooey substance that will make me vomit if I think about it too hard.
He takes the bottom of my palm and grips me gently, so I could snatch my arm away if I really want to.
I don’t want to, of course. I let Zeb get my arm clean, and then he takes my other arm and cleans me off.
Slowly, he helps get water under the thickest parts of my hair so that it soaks through properly.
I’ve never allowed a man to touch my hair and the second Zeb’s fingers make contact with my scalp, shivers travel all the way down my spine.
He doesn’t take his eyes off me while he cleans me and while I know logically that he must be seeing every raw, unclothed inch of me, I don’t feel like he’s staring or looking at me out of unbridled lust.
Zeb’s fingers spread the strands of my hair apart and he combs out my hair without grabbing at the tangles.
He has to get close to me to get the muck and sweat out of my hair, and I grow profoundly aware of his warmth, just how much bigger Zeb’s body is in comparison to mine, and how large certain parts of me are now that we’re essentially forced to be pressed up together like this.
He pulls away from me once he’s done with my hair.
He looks around for a bottle of shampoo and I don’t even bother to tell him to be sparing with it.
Normally, I would fuss way more about the outcome of a hair wash, but I just want everything that happened outside to go spiraling down the motel shower drain.
Zeb lathers up my hair and washes the shampoo out without getting any in my eyes.
Considering our position in the shower, he’s better at the job than most hair stylists I’ve been to.
Once he has my hair clean, Zeb fills it up with conditioner and twists my hair into a low bun.
He kisses my forehead and mutters, “Let me clean the rest of you.”
When he’s so close to being done with his quiet, painstaking work, I half expect Zeb to lecture me or blame me for running off.
He let me wash my intimate areas without his assistance, which again surprised me.
There are signs that he’s not completely immune to seeing my body naked.
But he’s either trying to suppress those feelings or distracted by something more intense.
My guess is, he’s distracted by anger with me.
He’s fallen so quiet and looks so stern that I really expect him to chastise me.
“I think I’ve made the mistake of growing attached to you,” he says.
Mistake. I don’t know why that word sticks out over everything else he said. It doesn’t really matter if he’s attached if he thinks it’s a bad thing.
“Why is it a mistake?”
“Because this is my life and it won’t get any easier in the next few months.”
“I’m fine, Zeb.”
“You’re fine right now. But what if I hadn’t come outside? What if we weren’t on the one stretch of highway that I’m guaranteed to get help quickly? I didn’t realize how much it would fuck me up to lose you.”
Is that why he went so far? There’s something deeply and strangely sensitive in Zeb right now and his hand trembles as he holds the washcloth, which he grips tightly in an effort to steady his hand and further conceal his intense emotions from me.
I’m attracted to him – it’s not that I’m not attracted to him, but I don’t want Zeb to use me and then dump me on the side of the road.
I don’t want him to tell me that he loves me and then cheat on me like the last guy I trusted with my heart.
If I couldn’t trust the guy who was good on paper and who promised to my face that he would love every last inch of me for the rest of my life, why would I be able to trust a man who chillingly and remorselessly murders other people.
My throat tightens as my efforts to rationalize away my attraction for Zeb fail miserably.
His body is too close for me to ignore, and while I might smell like the sweet mixture of lemongrass and cotton sheets from the motel soap, Zeb still smells like sweat and a thick coating of natural, masculine musk.
“I’m not your responsibility. Once… I… If I’m too much trouble to keep track of, you can send me back.”
“No,” Zeb shoots back, his hand dropping the washcloth and reaching possessively, and instinctively for my arm. My eyes immediately snap up to meet his intense pale blue gaze. “You don’t understand, Janelle. I can’t let you go. Ever.”
There’s something sinister in his tone as he says the last word.
I don’t even bother trying to break free from Zeb’s tight grasp.
I know that I couldn’t if I tried. He’s more than twice my size and as much as I trust him to protect me, there’s a dark and frequently visible part of him that scares me.
“I have a life, Zeb.”
“I would never take your life away from you, angel,” he says in a quiet, but insanely deep voice.
He sounds exactly like what I imagine the devil would have sounded like.
Hypnotic. Sexy. Like I want to cover my ears whenever he speaks, but I can’t.
Instead, I bite down on my lower lip and try to think of something to say that will put my foot down completely.
Instead, Zeb touches my lips with his fingers.
He’s so fucking sexy. And evil. And… he kisses me.
Right there in the shower, for the second time since the day we met, Zeb kisses me and this time, it’s so different from the first time that I nearly stumble backwards.
I take a step and nearly slip before feeling a large, sturdy arm behind me, holding me still and keeping me propped up – firmly against Zeb’s naked body.