Chapter 31 Dane
DANE
I saw it all happening like a slow-motion replay on a football game: that damned dog and Lyle’s creepy cat, the gavel, the chairs, the projector.
I wasn’t even that surprised when the power went out. The building’s electrical systems hadn’t been upgraded in decades, and the projector looked like something out of the history books. Who used slides anymore?
“I’ll get Avery.” I couldn’t see Beck or Noah but I knew they were there. “You get Lena.”
I waded into the fray like an icebreaker, not exactly mowing people down but not being too careful either. Avery was in there, and these kinds of situations, funny as they might seem, could turn quickly into a dangerous stampede.
I’d seen her crouch to pick up the fallen slides from the projector, knew she’d been close to the ground when the power cut.
I used my phone to light my way, wading through the panicked faces, directing people to the exit behind me as I headed for the center of the room where Avery had been when the lights went out.
I spotted her a few seconds later, standing next to Lena, a look of shock on her pretty face.
I took ahold of her arm to make sure we wouldn’t get separated in the crowd. “Let’s go.”
She jumped, then looked up. “Dane?”
“Later.” I started propelling her out of the room, but she looked over her shoulder. “Lena!”
I didn’t stop moving. “Beck and Noah will get her out.”
It felt like it took forever to get to the doors but it was probably less than a minute. Then we were spilling into the hall along with everyone else trying to get out of the dark, cramped room.
It was dark in the hall too. The whole building was down.
Jesus. I was no fan of the Hearthstone project but the town really did need some upgrades if a yanked cord on an ancient machine in one of the meeting rooms could take down the building's power.
Everyone else was heading for the doors, anxious to get outside. I hesitated, then guided Avery in the opposite direction, deeper into the building, my hand still on her arm.
“Stop!” She tried to pull away but I barely noticed, I was on a mission to get her away from the thundering crowd, at least until things calmed down. We were halfway down the hall when she finally yanked her arm free. “Stop it! Where are we going?”
I’d turned off my flashlight when I reached her in the meeting room, but there was just enough light spilling in from the streetlamps on the other side of the exit doors that I could make out the flash of her dark eyes, the perfect bow of her mouth.
“We’ll find another way out,” I said. “It’s too dangerous with so many people trying to get out the same way.”
I grabbed on to her arm and started moving again.
“I can walk without your giant paw cutting off my circulation,” she grumbled.
“I’m sure you can. You know your way around in here?”
“No,” she admitted.
“Then stop complaining and trust me.”
We wound our way past several offices — the town clerk, the planning commissioner, the mayor’s office — until we came to the two small courtrooms that acted as a backdrop to the minor infractions that usually occurred in Blackwell Hollow: dogs off-lead, unpaid parking tickets, the occasional display of graffiti.
“This way.”
I put the odds at fifty-fifty that the door to the first courtroom was locked, but the knob turned easily, and a few seconds later I was pushing Avery inside.
“Sugar!” Avery panted. “That was crazy.”
“What were you doing there anyway?” I asked, leaning against the closed door.
She lifted her chin. “I was just…” She stopped abruptly and narrowed her eyes. “What were you doing there? You, Beck, and Noah?”
“I asked you first.”
“I asked you second,” she said.
“I don’t answer to you.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t answer to you either.”
I ran my hands through my hair in frustration. I’d never met someone who could be both so immature and so alluring at the same time. I mean, she refused to swear, she snuck around like a troublesome teenager, and I was starting to get the feeling she might be a bit of a brat.
Not my usual type.
But still I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
“We were following you.”
Her eyes widened. “You were following me?”
I walked around the room, looking for an exit that might lead outside. “That’s what I said.”
I wasn’t in the habit of apologizing. For anything.
“What the fudge? Why on earth were you following me?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a murderer on the loose.” No need to tell her the other part: that her mention of a “friend” had driven all of us — Beck, Noah, and me — out of the house and on her heels.
“You’re acting like the murderer is some random killer instead of someone who obviously targeted Harold Pembroke,” she said. “And you wouldn’t have the right to follow me even if there was a random psycho killer on the loose.”
I tried one of the doors behind the judge’s bench, hoping it might lead to an office and another exit, but it was locked. “There are things you don’t know.”
“What things?” Avery set the transparent slides on one of the tables where the lawyers sat when they were presenting a case.
“Things.” Damn. The second door behind the judge’s bench was locked too.
“If these ‘things’ are serious enough that you’re following me around town, I think I deserve to know what they are.”
“What do you care?” I walked in front of the bench and turned to face her. “You’re not going to be here long anyway.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t care.”
“Sure it does.” I knew what was happening, knew I was coating my disappointment in cynicism the way I always did, but I was powerless to stop it.
I didn’t want Avery to leave, but I couldn’t articulate why and I definitely wasn’t up for telling her that.
“You can’t claim to care about people, about a place, and then bail on them. ”
My voice had gotten hard, the way it did when I shut down.
It hadn’t happened in a long time, mostly because I’d learned not to care about anybody enough to be disappointed when they bailed.
“I’m not… bailing.”
I folded my arms over my chest. “What would you call it?”
“I… I have a life in the city. I can’t just leave.”
“You don’t owe me an explanation. Just don’t act like you’re invested in Blackwell Hollow when you’re planning to cash out and never look back.”
We were separated by the space between the judge’s bench and the lawyer’s tables, but I saw her eyes flash even across the distance. “You’re a real jerk, you know that?”
I shrugged. “At least I’m honest.”
“I call bull-sugar.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Bull-sugar?”
“Yep. I don’t think you’re being honest at all about why you followed me.”
I held her gaze across the shadowed room, but instead of making Avery squirm, I shifted on my feet under the weight of her gaze.
Jesus fuck. Why was this strange, absurd girl getting under my skin? And why was I protecting Beck and Noah?
“You’re right,” I said. “We followed you because Beck and Noah were jealous.”
Sucks to be you, losers.
She shook her head, clearly confused. “Jealous of what?
“You said you were meeting a friend, and since you have Beck and Noah wrapped around your finger, they got hot under the collar about the possibility that you were meeting another guy.”
“I was meeting Lena.”
“Yeah, I think they’ve figured that out by now.”
She stared at me across the room. “So why were you there?”
I wanted to hold her gaze and lie, but I couldn’t do it. It was either tell her the truth or look away, and fuck me if I didn’t want to look away.
“Maybe I was jealous too.”
“You don’t even like me.” She sounded so sad that I wanted to take back every harsh word I’d ever said to her. Every time I’d made her feel guilty about Evelyn or unwelcome in the house.
“I never said I didn’t like you.” The darkness in the courtroom had created a strange kind of intimacy. I was saying too much.
Revealing too much.
“It’s obvious,” she said.
I pushed off the judge’s bench and crossed the distance between us. When I came to a stop, she was only inches away. My dick stirred in my jeans, the scent of sweet apples blowing through my body like a warm autumn breeze.
She was more than pretty. She was fucking addicting. I wanted to soak her up: her face, her smell… everything.
I looked down at her. “Sometimes things aren’t what they seem.”
Her breath had turned shallow, her chest rising and falling fast enough that I could see it. “Are you saying you… like me?”
“I don’t know you enough to like you… but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you.” The first part wasn’t entirely true. I liked the way she lit up a room. I liked the way she smelled like apples. I liked the way she said ridiculous things to avoid swearing. “Do you like me?”
Why was my fucking voice so gruff? And why did I care about her answer?
“I don’t know you enough to like you.”
I held my breath, praying there was more coming.
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you,” she said.
I took a step toward her, colliding with the softness of her body, and smashed my lips onto hers.