Chapter 12
Skylar
One second, I’m wrapped in Zane’s arms with the warmth of his body against mine, his chest beneath my cheek, and the morning light spilling across the room as if it has absolutely no idea what happened in here last night and frankly has no business being this cheerful about it.
The next moment, reality arrives in the form of my ringtone, which has always had terrible timing and apparently sees no reason to change that now.
I sit up and feel the exact moment his arm falls away from my waist. The loss is immediate and I am not going to think about what that means at six in the morning, with my hair doing God knows what and my brain still somewhere back in last night.
The bed shifts beneath me as I lean over the edge, searching through the wreckage of clothes scattered across the floor. My bra is near Zane’s boot. My skirt twisted around the bed leg, turned inside out, because apparently even my clothes went through something last night and needed a moment.
The ringing keeps going.
“Shit,” I mutter, grabbing the skirt and shoving my hand into its pocket.
My fingers curl around my phone and I pull it free.
Cassie’s name flashes across the screen in large, accusatory letters.
Of course it’s her. Nobody else calls this aggressively before coffee unless someone has died, someone needs bail, or Cassie has decided that silence is a personal attack and she will not stand for it.
I answer before it stops. “Hello?”
Half a second of breathing. Then, “Well, fuck me sideways. You’re alive.”
I close my eyes. “Good morning to you, too.”
“Do not good-morning me in that suspicious voice. Where the fuck are you?”
“In a room.”
“Wow. Love the detail. It really paints the crime scene.”
I rub a hand over my face. “Cassie.”
“No. Don’t you Cassie me. I woke up, and you were gone. Your bed was untouched, and you have not answered any of my eleven tasteful, very restrained messages.”
“You sent eleven messages.”
“Exactly. Restraint. I showed enormous personal growth and you weren’t even there to witness it.”
Behind me, the mattress shifts. I turn my head and see Zane getting out of the bed.
The sheet slides off his hips and every thought in my head forgets where it was going and sits down on the floor.
He stands with his back half turned to me, all hard muscle, broad shoulders and sleep-rough hair.
Morning light cuts across him in warm lines and drags over the shape of his arms. The tattooed and scarred geography of a man who has been through hell and come out the other side looking like that, which frankly feels like a violation of some natural law about consequences.
He bends to pick up his jeans from the floor.
My mouth goes completely dry.
“Skylar?” Cassie says.
“Hmm?”
“Oh my God.” Her voice sharpens. “Did you just hmm me? You only hmm when you are distracted or looking at carbs.”
“I’m listening.”
“No you are not. You have that voice.”
“What voice?”
“The voice of a woman staring at something she knows will cost her, yet she has decided to buy it anyway.”
Zane finds his jeans. He pulls them on, one leg at a time, slow and unhurried, the way he does everything. I watch the muscles shift across his back and have absolutely no remorse about it.
“Skylar.” Cassie’s voice drops into that particular deadly calm she reserves for moments of genuine suspicion. “Where the fuck are you?”
I drag my eyes away from Zane with an effort that deserves formal recognition. “I’m not with Damien.”
A pause.
Then Cassie gasps so loudly that I have to pull the phone away from my ear to protect what is left of my hearing.
I glance toward the window. “I went for a drive.”
“Oh, brilliant. Very calming. Very serial-killer-documentary-opening. Where did the drive end, Sky?”
I glance at Zane.
He is watching me with too much amusement for this hour of the morning—his jeans half buttoned, his arms crossed, as if he has nowhere to be and every intention of enjoying whatever this phone call becomes.
“The workshop,” I say.
Cassie goes silent. Which is so much worse than her yelling. Cassie silent is Cassie loading. Then, very slowly, she says, “You went to Rainer’s workshop.”
“Yes.”
Another pause.
“And did Rainer require emotional support in the form of you not coming home last night?”
I bite the inside of my cheek. I know exactly where she is going with this and there is no road that does not end with me having this conversation.
Zane’s eyes narrow with interest. He can hear enough to enjoy it and he absolutely is. Bastard. He has the audacity to look entertained, standing there in the morning light.
“Rainer wasn’t here,” I say.
Cassie inhales. Deeply. Dramatically. The kind that signals she is preparing to deliver a comprehensive summary of events and that she wants everyone present to know she has done the math.
“So,” she says. “Let me just place my pieces on the board. You went for a drive and somehow ended up at the workshop. Rainer was not there, but Zane was. You did not come home. And you currently sound like a woman who has had sex and possibly a minor spiritual experience, though, knowing Zane Rivera, God probably showed himself after the first cocky comment.”
My face heats in a way that has nothing to do with the morning light and everything to do with the fact that I have told Cassie things over the years, specific, detailed sexual things about Zane, in the way you tell your best friend things at two in the morning when wine is involved and the past feels safely distant.
But it’s not distant right now.
Zane’s mouth spreads into a full, slow grin. Absolute asshole.
“Cassie,” I say.
“Oh, my God. You did. You actually fucked him.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. Your shame is breathing directly into the phone, Sky. I can hear it. It has its own ZIP code.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“You are not hanging up. I have questions, concerns, and a moral obligation to be annoying about this. You were aware of that when you answered, so here we are.”
Zane’s grin has not shifted. If anything, it has deepened, which should be illegal at this hour without prior warning.
“Stop listening,” I tell him.
“Not a chance,” he says.
He walks toward the kitchen with the kind of ease that has nothing to do with the teenage swagger I remember and everything to do with a man who has learned how to make silence do half the damage. Less noise. More weight. And it’s somehow worse.
He reaches for the coffee jar.
I watch the muscles shift across his back and make absolutely no apology for it.
“You’re staring again, aren’t you?” Cassie says in my ear.
“No.”
“You are such a liar. Is he naked?”
“No.”
“Was he naked?”
I don’t respond.
She makes a sound that can only be described as delighted asphyxiation. “Skylar Elizabeth Louise Mayfair Tullah James.”
“That’s not my name,” I say, pulling the sheet up over my bare legs, even though Cassie can’t see me and the gesture is entirely for my own dignity. Which, if we are being honest, is hanging by a thread. “I’m safe. That is all you need.”
“Safe as in physically safe, or safe as in emotionally about to throw yourself into a burning building because the flames have nice arms and a criminal record?”
Zane glances back at me from the counter as he fills the kettle.
One look, but the heat in it makes my throat go dry in a way that has no business happening before coffee.
That want is still there in him, dark and alive, just under the surface as he stands in the kitchen in low-slung jeans with sleep-rough hair and an expression that says he is very aware of exactly what he is doing to me and has no intention of stopping.
“Sky,” Cassie says, and her voice has shed its armor.
I blink. “I’m here.”
“I know where you are now.” The joke is gone. In its place is the Cassie beneath all the wit, the sharp edges, and the perfectly delivered burns. “I’m asking if you’re okay.”
The question slips past my guard before I can get anything up to stop it.
“I don’t know,” I say, honest. It’s the truest thing I’ve said out loud since I walked back through that roller door last night.
Cassie is quiet.
Then, “Okay. That is allowed. You are allowed to feel that.”
Zane moves around the tiny kitchen, opening cupboards and grabbing two mugs.
The simple act of him making coffee should not be intimate.
But it is. Maybe because this room once knew us young and half-starved, running on bad decisions and each other.
Maybe because there were mornings when he made me instant coffee too strong and watched me drink it as if it was the most important thing he had ever done.
“You can come home whenever you want,” Cassie says. “No judgment.” A pause. “Well, limited judgment from someone who wants every single detail in chronological order, with emotional annotations.”
A laugh slips out of me before I can stop it. It sounds strange in this room at this hour.
Zane looks over. His face softens when he hears it, enough that I have to look down at the sheet on my legs instead of at him.
“I’ll come back later,” I say.
“Later today?”
“Yes.”
“Before I send a search party?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because my search party is just me and one can of pepper spray and I will absolutely use it on the wrong person.” She pauses. “Tell Zane I said hi.”
Zane is already walking toward me with two mugs, his eyes finding mine as I look up.
“Cassie says hi.”
He hands me one of the mugs, his fingers brushing mine as he passes it over.
His mouth curves. “Tell Cassie she is one well-timed insult away from being registered as a public safety concern.”
“I heard that,” Cassie says loudly and without shame over the phone. “And tell him that public safety concerns are powerful, memorable, and impossible to ignore, so I will take it.”
I relay it.
Zane leans one shoulder against the wall, mug in hand, all bare chest, and ruined beauty. He smirks into his coffee. “Sounds about right.”
I watch him for one dangerous, specific second.