Epilogue #3
The dim light that reached us from the hotel’s windows turned his brown hair black.
It was uncharacteristically slicked back tonight, his usual waves tamed for the wedding, and it put his strong jaw and a dangerously seductive cleft prominently on display.
His eyes, usually a baby blue spiked with an icy fire, were nothing more than dark wells in the darkness tonight.
He’d already lost the suit jacket he’d worn to Maisey and Beckett’s wedding, leaving him in a plain dress shirt that did nothing to hide the solid brick of his chest. He’d pulled off his tie and flung it over his shoulder, undone the top few buttons of the shirt, and rolled the sleeves up, showing off thick biceps.
Somehow, seeing him like this felt incredibly intimate, as if I’d captured him in his room, undressing.
And it did nothing to help my poor frozen lungs. If anything, it stopped my breath further.
He was the most attractive man I’d seen off a movie screen.
More attractive than even—
Just the mere memory of the last man I’d thought to be this good-looking was enough to blur my vision and have me tilting back into the car.
And then Cooper was there, putting a hand to my elbow.
“Hey,” his voice softened as he took in my obvious distress, gripping me tighter.
His touch scored me. Marked me.
And I’d promised myself I’d never be marked again. But I couldn’t breathe well enough to tell him to back off. Instead, the world continued to spin, and I knew if I didn’t inhale, I’d faint. I’d be on the ground…helpless.
That thought only increased my panic.
Increased the pulse of blood pumping through my veins and seeming to shove a cork into my throat, sealing it completely.
“Andrina. Take a breath before you pass out,” he commanded. A man used to giving orders that were followed. But that thought only made matters worse.
I made a useless motion with a weak hand as more panic rolled through me, and an uncontrollable tremor added to the turmoil in my body.
It wasn’t because of Cooper. He was the sheriff of Swift Rivers, for god’s sake. He wasn’t going to hurt me.
But then again, you never knew, did you?
I’d thought…
No. No. Thinking of my past would not help me recover from this panic attack.
Before I could register what was happening, Cooper had opened the front passenger door of my SUV, pushed me into the seat with my feet hanging out the door, and shoved my head between my legs.
“Breathe, damn it. Nice and slow.”
Cooperate, body. Cooperate! With every ounce of willpower I had, I forced my mouth to unlock and accept the cool night air. And finally. Finally, my lungs received the breath they’d so desperately needed. I gasped at the pain, as if it really was the first burst of oxygen after a fall.
“Slow. Count to four as you inhale. Hold it for four, and then let out for four,” Cooper insisted, rubbing my shoulder. He counted for me, as if I were a child and couldn’t. And I did as he told me because I didn’t have another option at the moment.
As my lungs slowly recovered, as my body finally stopped shaking, anger and humiliation filtered in. At my body for betraying me. At Cooper Wylee for witnessing it.
I pushed the hand on my shoulder away. “Back off,” I snapped.
And he did just that, taking two steps away from me.
It helped to have him farther away. It eased the zap and hiss of electricity that sizzled through me whenever he was too close.
When my breathing was normal and the trembling had stopped, I gritted my teeth and finally sat up.
He was watching me, but I couldn’t read the expression there. It was too dark, and he was turned away from the hotel’s lights, leaving his face a mix of shadows.
“What do you want?” I hissed.
He shoved his hands into his pants’ pockets. “Before this little show”—he waved at me sitting in the car, still forcing myself to breathe—“I wanted a response to my damn message. Now I want to know who the hell you’re afraid of and what they did to you.”
Tears threatened, and I blinked furiously, grinding my teeth together again.
No way was I going to embarrass myself more by crying in front of him. Tears I’d refused to shed for years now.
No way was I giving any man—let alone this cold, disapproving one—an ounce of my emotions ever again.
Cooper
BAD MOON RISING
Performed by Creedence Clearwater Revival
Someone had done a number on her. Someone had taken this confident, beautiful, tough-as-nails woman and broken her.
That pissed me off. But it also had a voice in my head screaming at me to run.
Because I couldn’t afford one more broken woman entering and leaving my life.
I couldn’t afford what came in the aftermath.
Scandal. Heartache. Loneliness.
Screw that. I wasn’t lonely. I didn’t have time to be lonely. Not with an entire town counting on me. Not with my dad watching over my shoulder so I wouldn’t fail at the job he’d had for nearly three and a half decades. Not with a tween son rebelling against everything and everyone, including me.
And if I didn’t have time for loneliness, I certainly didn’t have time for Andrina Nealy, her once copper hair now dyed to a dark sheen that still glistened with licks of the former flames, or those storm-colored eyes that promised chaos.
I didn’t have time for a woman whose past I’d already suspected was nothing but smoke and mirrors. A card house ready to tumble to the ground with the next slight breeze.
Unknown
ANNABELLE
Performed by Shaboozey
Fucking bitch. Fucking bitch putting out all those pathetic signals to catch her next mark.
But he couldn’t fucking have her.
She’d already promised forever to someone else.
And I’d see her in hell before she broke those vows again.