Chapter Fourteen
Dalton wouldn’t be able to sleep if he tried.
The update from his sister, Jules, had his stomach burning and his mind churning.
His grandfather woke up for five minutes.
Unfortunately, Jules had been outside grabbing a little sunshine to rejuvenate after what had been a long night of sleeping in fits and starts.
Essentially, when their grandparents needed someone to be in the room, no one had been there.
He didn’t blame Jules. She was one person and doing a helluva fine job being “on” nearly twenty-four hours a day.
She needed support. Maybe it was a mistake to have only one person on duty.
The job might be too much for one individual to cope with.
And yet, he couldn’t leave Blakely right now either.
Did that make him the worst human in the world?
For someone who claimed to always put family first, how many holidays had he been home for in recent years?
Not many. In fact, he volunteered to work so others could be home with their kiddos.
Murderers didn’t take holidays off. In fact, they had a habit of striking when opportunity presented itself.
A cold chill raced down his back at the thought of Johnny Spear getting to Blakely.
Dalton shook off the thought as best as he could, took a shower in the hall bath and then routed for clean clothes in the laundry basket. He threw on a pair of boxers and cotton workout shorts, grabbed a blanket after washing her clothes, and then rested his eyes while lying down on the sofa.
He rarely needed more than a cat nap when he was on a protection assignment, so he got up before the sun and finished the small load of laundry.
The least he could do was give her clean clothes to wake up to.
Handling her pink silk panties had sent blood flowing south, but he was no longer a hormonal teenager.
He was a grown man, who was capable of doing laundry without needing a cold shower afterward.
Remembering how silky Blakely’s skin had felt under his touch was another story. It created a visceral memory that was more difficult to tamp down.
Dalton almost laughed out loud. Grown man, huh?
A fresh cup of coffee helped wake him up. He was still full from last night, so he grabbed his phone and checked to see if a message had come through on the group chat. When he’d talked to Jules last night, she’d sounded hopeful there was a chance their grandfather would wake up again.
Of course, they’d been going down this road long enough for him to be educated on the fact someone in a coma could wake up, seem totally fine and then go right back under, never to wake again.
Too many weeks had passed for Dalton to expect this situation to end well. Duke, his cousin, mentioned that they might want to think about what they wanted to do with the ranch if their grandparents didn’t make a meaningful recovery.
Dalton just wasn’t there yet. He couldn’t see a world where his strong-as-an-ox grandfather wasn’t at the helm of Remington Paint Ranch.
This wasn’t the time to think about comfort food, but he couldn’t stop himself from wanting a chicken-fried steak from Mama Bea’s place in Mesa Point.
Every time he thought about the ranch, Mama Bea came up.
Her food was the definition of heaven. A little voice in the back of his mind picked that moment to point out that he’d found heaven in everything when he was with Blakely.
He reminded himself how fast she’d bolted before and how little use there was in thinking there was even a remote possibility she would let him in her life, no matter how much electricity charged the air in between them every time they were within arm’s reach of one another.
Or how much his mouth ached to claim hers, marking her as his, when their gazes met.
Or how sexy she was in a jogging suit. Of course, she was even sexier with nothing on.
“Good morning,” she said after clearing her throat. He hadn’t heard her open the bedroom door. She caught him off guard, especially considering he’d just pictured her naked. She held out the pink robe, which was folded up. “This belongs to you. Or should I say your girlfriend?”
“No girlfriend,” he said quickly and with a little heat as he met her across the room. “Is that how little you think of me?”
“I wasn’t sure what to think when you left out a pink ladies’ bathrobe for me, Dalton.”
Was she jealous?
“The robe belongs to my sister,” he said.
“She slept over on her way to serve a warrant, got a tip her felon was about to move and hightailed it out of here so fast she forgot to take her favorite robe with her.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “It looked to be about your size, so I thought you might want to use it once you got out of the shower. But I didn’t realize—”
“Never mind,” she quipped, handing over the bundle. “I just thought something else. That’s all. No big deal.”
Well, it sure as hell sounded like a big deal to him. Or was that wishful thinking on his part?
“For the record, if you were in a relationship with someone else, it would be a very big deal to me,” he said before walking out of the living room to set the robe on top of the washing machine.
When he returned to the kitchen, the sun had begun to rise, and Blakely nursed a cup of coffee while standing in his kitchen looking better than she had a right to.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said. She seemed content to let his comment fly past without acknowledgment. “We should probably head to my house so I can grab clothes for work.” She issued a sigh. “Though, nothing in me wants to go back there.”
“We can always stop by a twenty-four-hour big-box store instead,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I need to face it even if I don’t want to.”
“There’s nothing wrong with giving yourself a minute, Blakely. You don’t always have to make the hard decision and push through if you need a little more time.”
She blew out a breath. “I’ve been pushing through life ever since I can remember.
It got me through the deaths of my parents.
It got me through the responsibility of taking care of my sibling.
And it got me through both undergrad and law school.
I’m one of the youngest judges seated in Texas.
What if I don’t know how to take more time? What if this is just who I am?”
Dalton was beginning to realize how much the story you told yourself about your life shaped it. “I think you’re amazing, and you can be anything you want to be.”
“What if I can’t do it?”
“It might be hard, but if you put your mind to it, I doubt there’s anything you can’t accomplish,” he said and meant every word.
“Do you mean that, Dalton?”
“I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life,” he reassured. “Plus, I’ve been told that I have a stubborn streak a mile long. Until I met you, I thought that was as far as a stubborn streak could go. You proved me wrong on that.”
Blakely broke into a smile. “How is it that you can make me laugh so easily?”
“That’s easy?” he shot back, matching her smile.
“Okay, tough guy,” she said. “You better go get dressed while I come up with a plan to get in and out of my house without incident.”
“I’ll call to let my contact at Houston PD know we’ll be heading that way so he can get eyes on the place,” Dalton said before excusing himself and heading into the bedroom to grab clothes.
He dressed in a suit since he was taking Blakely to her courtroom.
Once inside, it would be difficult if not impossible for Johnny Spear to get to her.
On the way in was another story altogether, but he could alert the bailiff when they got close so extra eyes could be on her when Dalton dropped her off at the front door.
Leaving his apartment caused a bad feeling to settle in the pit of his stomach. Was he being overly cautious with Blakely due to their past?
Or their present?
* * *
Whoa! Blakely couldn’t remember the last time she witnessed a man wearing a suit in the same way Dalton wore a suit. He filled out every thread of material that looked handspun by angels. What could she say? The man was perfection.
“You dress up nicely, Mr. Remington,” she managed to say through a dry-as-desert throat. Was it suddenly getting hot in the apartment?
“Thank you, ma’am,” he responded with a smile that could charm the pants off anyone with eyes.
“After you.” That same smile had been good at seducing her in Galveston.
She’d been drawn to him like the magnet to steel cliché.
The sister trip was supposed to be a chance for her and Bethany to catch up on each other’s lives, spend some real time together.
Except that Chase had gotten sick at the last minute, so Bethany had been needed at home.
Since Blakely had funded the whole weekend and couldn’t get her money back, she’d said what the hell and gone by herself on a whim.
Okay, she’d been feeling sorry for herself.
She could admit that now. She’d realized how needed her sister was and how much the opposite was true for Blakely.
No one would even notice if she disappeared off the face of the earth.
That wasn’t completely true. Bethany and Chase would miss her dearly.
But they had each other, and they would be fine.
Sitting alone at the restaurant where she’d originally made a reservation for two had been beyond sad.
Then, Dalton had walked in. He’d asked for a table for one and been told they couldn’t seat him until after nine o’clock.
He’d asked about placing a to-go order and had been told that could be arranged.
Without thinking, or in her case overthinking her next move, she’d waved him over and told him that she wouldn’t mind the company if he wanted to eat with her.
Eating at home alone every night was one thing.
She was used to it. All she had to do was turn on the TV for background noise, and she was just fine.
But eating out in public alone had just felt sad to her.
The pity party she was having for herself had made her mad enough to ask a stranger to sit down.
Dalton had thanked her and then told the hostess that he wasn’t going to need to place a to-go order after all.
They’d made an agreement not to discuss work or anything too personal. But the night flew by. She couldn’t even remember what either of them had said, but she remembered thinking, This man is far too beautiful to be sitting here with me.
The only information she’d divulged on a personal level was that she’d spent too many years in school but that she liked her job, so the long semesters spent with her nose in a book had turned out to be worth it after all.
He’d asked what her field of study had been. She’d laughed.
He’d asked if he could guess. She’d laughed.
He’d asked if he could walk her back to her hotel. She’d smiled and decided to take a chance.
After all, what was the harm in being escorted back to her hotel, considering she could see it from the restaurant? They’d sat in the lobby for another hour before she’d done something she never had before…invited him upstairs.
The next morning, he invited her to breakfast at the house he’d rented. “Were you on a stakeout when we met?” she asked him as the elevator dinged, indicating they were on the ground floor.
“No,” he responded. “That would have been unprofessional.”
She stepped out of the elevator and followed him through the first-floor lobby and to his truck. “Then what were you doing in Galveston?”
“It was work related,” he said as he opened the door for her. She climbed in the passenger side and lowered the seat back to hide her face from view as much as possible. Dalton smiled approval at the move, and it gave her stomach a little flip.
He rounded the front of the truck and then reclaimed the driver’s seat. “I was waiting for a felon to show up. We had good intel that he would be there any day, so we spread out and set up shop.”
“How many of you were there?”
“From the Marshals office? Just me,” he said. “But there was a task force on this one because he was on the most wanted list.”
Blakely had been eating in a restaurant possibly with one of the worst criminals in America, and the man could have walked right past her and she wouldn’t have known it. “Whoa. I’m guessing he never showed.”
“You guessed correctly,” he said. “In fact, he ended up on one of the cruise ships as staff two weeks later.”
“So you wasted your time,” she pointed out.
“Spending the weekend with you could never be considered a waste of time as far as I’m concerned,” he said so low that she almost didn’t hear him. Those words, though, sent more of that warmth circling through her, settling inside her thighs. Her body remembered his touch, craved it even now.
Where was logic when it came to matters of the heart?
Blakely cleared her throat. She couldn’t think about how much she’d missed his touch in the weeks since.
She couldn’t think about how many times she’d had to force this man from her thoughts, especially at night when she tried to sleep but images of him kept popping into her mind.
And she couldn’t think about how right she’d felt in this man’s arms and how safe, even if it only lasted a short time.
Blakely couldn’t afford to give someone her safety. Besides, she’d gotten by fine on her own all these years. And she’d be fine moving forward.
So why did it feel like such a lie this time?