Chapter 14
LILY
The drive home is uneventful.
I check my mirrors every thirty seconds. No headlights following. No vehicles maintaining consistent distance. Mason didn't follow.
Or he's good enough that I can't detect him.
That possibility makes my hands tighten on the wheel. Because it freaks me out, or because of the anticipation that he might show up? I don’t know.
I live in a residential neighborhood on the edge of town.
The houses are from the fifties and exactly like you’d imagine in a small town like Iron Ridge: affordable, unremarkable, and small.
My neighbors are nosy—a single-woman vet is an oddity they can’t leave alone—and the houses are pressed so close they can probably hear me pee.
In other words: it’s perfect. No one would be able to get to me without one of my neighbors noticing.
I pull into my drive and turn off the car, taking a moment to check out my house. It looks like it should, but I pull out my phone and check for notifications from the motion sensors I have installed.
No triggers while I was gone. The house is secure.
I let myself in through the back door and step inside, immediately disarming the security system. I have thirty seconds to input the code before the alarm triggers. I make it with ten seconds to spare.
I turn on all the lights, starting with the kitchen, one by one as I move through the house, checking each room. By the time I’m done, it practically looks like daytime inside. I don’t mind the electricity bill. I hate the dark.
Shrugging out of my jacket, I leave it and my purse within easy reach of the door—an old habit from years of midnight emergency calls and needing to move fast. At least, that’s what I tell people.
The truth? I started doing it after I escaped. Cold, half naked, barefoot and running for my life taught me I never want to get caught unprepared ever again.
I slump onto my secondhand couch, my hands covering my face. Tonight didn’t go the way I thought it would. Because when I set out for the Rusty Spur, I had no idea I’d see Mason Rivera, or that he’d flirt with me, like he saw every damaged, paranoid piece of me and wanted closer anyway.
Neither had I expected to see the man who killed Mandy.
“That’s a win,” I tell myself, lifting my head and reaching for the laptop on the coffee table in front of me. I shoot off an email to Wes, to tell him who I saw and what Mason told me about him.
I don’t tell him that Mason warned me away from Turner and his foreman.
I also don’t tell him that Mason looked at me just like my friend Emma said—like he likes me. Like he wanted to get to know me a lot more.
At least until he looked at me like I was something fragile that needed protecting.
I hate him for that.
But I hate myself more for wondering if that'd be a bad thing, for craving it—the weight of his attention, the intensity of his gaze tracking my every movement, the way his presence makes my skin feel too tight and my breath catch in my throat.
I wonder what it would feel like to have those hands—the ones that move with such lethal precision—touch me.
To have him hold me and tell me everything will be alright, his voice low, a light in my darkness.
The thought terrifies me because I want it so badly I ache, a hunger I haven't felt ever in my life, a need that's raw and visceral and entirely his fault.
Because it’s got to be his fault that I see him and instantly light up.
My body has never responded to anyone like that—not even to my own fingers and imagination.
It usually takes me a long time to orgasm, and even then I don’t always come.
But just picturing him, imagining his hands unbuttoning my pants, his fingers sliding into my panties, his lips on my neck as he whispers filthy things to me—that gets me burning hot.
And that's what scares me most.
Pushing to standing, I head up to my bedroom.