Chapter 41
Gray
Two hours later, Ash and I lie tangled together on his couch. We haven’t moved for the last twenty minutes. The TV isn’t even on.
He has on his boxer briefs, and I have my bra and thong back on as we cuddle under a blanket together.
We’ve eaten some soup, had sex in his bedroom again, and talked about his declaration that he’ll be going in bareback next time.
Not today, but in the near future. He’s been tested, but I have to go.
Every now and then, Ash kisses my temple, and I have to keep from pinching myself. If this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up.
But because I can’t help rocking the boat…
“What is this?” I ask. My voice breaks the silence like someone dropped a plate on the floor.
“Hmm?” Ash asks.
I think I pulled him out of his own daydream.
I turn my head where it rests on Ash’s chest. “You said we’re dating. Officially. Does that mean the rest of the team knows about us? Should we tell Kaladin?”
His body tenses beneath mine.
“Kelsier knows,” he says. “And I should probably tell the rest of the team at this point, but Kaladin is a different story.”
“You’re afraid of what Kaladin will do if he finds out we’re really dating,” I say. I had the same concerns.
“I don’t want him to pull your funding,” he says. “Or worse, make us stop working together because of a conflict of interest.”
I start to nod against his chest, but then something occurs to me, and I sit up to face Ash.
“Do you think Kaladin already suspects?”
He frowns. “Why do you think that?”
He’s going to think I’m crazy, but…
“I thought I was just being paranoid since the whole thing at my house, but maybe I really am being followed.”
The expression that crosses his face looks like panic. “Like the man you saw at the grocery store,” he says, and there’s something in his voice I can’t place.
“Exactly,” I say. “I swear I saw him at my conference in Florida. It can’t be a coincidence he’s up here now.”
Ash sits up on the couch, and he looks…troubled?
Several seconds of silence congeal with the leftover soup before he says, “I have to tell you something, Gray.”
It feels like that other shoe I’ve been waiting for has just dropped. My stomach goes queasy, and I pray the soup I ate doesn’t come back up.
I try to stand, but Ash catches me around the waist and pulls me back.
“Wait,” he says.
“You’re married, aren’t you,” I say. “You’re married and your wife hired a private investigator to see if you’ve been cheating on her and…” The words come out in a chaotic rush, as I tug at Ash’s arms in an attempt to free myself. “Oh God. I’m the other woman, aren’t I.”
I knew my pessimism would prove right one of these days.
Ash frowns and tightens his arms to hold me in place. “What? No. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then what do you need to tell me?” I ask, trying and failing to keep the hysteria at bay. “What do you know about the man who’s been following me?”
“Men,” he says.
I go still and blink at him. “What?”
Ash sighs. “The men who’ve been following you. As in more than one. They’re a private security team I’ve had keeping an eye on you since your house was broken into.”
I’m stunned into silence. I’m not sure which part of that I find more insane. That there hasn’t just been one man following me, but several, or that Ash actually hired a security team to keep me safe.
I’m also not sure if that’s the sweetest thing someone’s ever done for me or if that’s a giant red flag. I mean, do I break up with him for crossing a line, or do I suck his cock again to show my appreciation. Both?
“But my house wasn’t broken into,” I say. “It was just my mother.”
It’s the least of the issues on the table, but my brain apparently feels the need to start small and work up to the whole ‘I hired a security team to secretly follow you 24/7’ thing.
“I…well, right. But we still can’t fully explain the window or your book, so better safe than sorry,” Ash says, seeming flustered.
I make another attempt to throw off the blanket and get up from the couch, and this time he lets me.
“I don’t know whether I should be grateful to you or furious with you,” I say as I start to pace.
“Baby, you need to put some clothes on while you decide,” Ash says, not looking at me. “It’s making my dick hard again to watch you walk around like that.”
I stop pacing and raise a brow. He gives me a ‘Sorry, but I can’t help it’ look, and I resume pacing.
Ash gets up. “Look,” he says, “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to worry you or make you self-conscious. I figured I’d just have the guys follow you for a little while and keep an eye on your house when you weren’t there until we knew for sure there wasn’t any danger.”
My brows shoot up again. “They’ve been watching my house too?”
He grimaces. “Yeah.”
I look away from him. I need to think about this, and that’s nearly impossible to do with a tall, well-muscled hockey player standing a few feet away in his underwear.
I’m about to get dressed to buy myself some time when I realize Ash is right next to me.
He grabs my shoulders lightly and turns me to face him.
“Gray, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I really thought I was doing the right thing to protect you.”
I let out a mirthless laugh. “You mean you really thought you were doing the right thing to protect your hockey career,” I snap at him.
Okay, so my psyche is defaulting to anger for now.
Ash’s eyes narrow, and his grip tightens on my shoulders. “Fuck hockey,” he says. “I did it because I love you and want you to be safe.”
And just like that my rage evaporates. It takes Ash a second longer to realize what he just said, but he steels his expression, refusing to backtrack or qualify the statement.
“What did you just say?” I whisper.
“You heard me,” he says. “I love you. You’re fucking mine, and I protect what’s mine.”
I stare at him for several long moments as I try to wrap my head around that.
“I…I…” The words are there on my tongue, but I can’t seem to speak them. “I don’t know what to say,” I say instead.
If he’s disappointed I didn’t say ‘I love you’ back, he doesn’t show it.
“Say you forgive me,” Ash says, “and I’ll eat your pussy for the rest of the night to show you how sorry I am.”
I give him a ‘Be serious’ look, but he shoots back an ‘I am serious’ one. He steps up to me, and I put my hands on his chest to push him back, but he wraps me in his arms so my own are pinned between us. He starts to kiss a path down my neck, and the goosebumps that rise on my skin betray me.
“Forgive me yet?” he asks against my throat, and I curse my weakness where this man is concerned.
I groan as I feel his teeth graze my skin. “Fine. Just promise me you won’t keep anything like this from me ever again,” I tell him.
I’m letting him off the hook easy, but to my surprise, his mouth stills, and he pulls back.
“What is it?” I ask.
“There’s…one more thing I should tell you,” he says.
My stomach plummets again. I knew it was too good to be true.
“What?” I ask as I pull away from him.
“Come sit down,” he says, his hand on my shoulder to steer me toward the couch.
I shake off the hand. “Just tell me.”
Ash looks at me, presumably deciding if he should insist on having me sit. He lets out a long breath. “Don’t freak out when I tell you this.”
“Oh my God. I’m already freaking out! Just tell me,” I snap.
Ash inhales deeply. “There…there was someone in your house that night besides your mother,” he says finally. “I didn’t just hire the security team to be on the safe side. I hired them because I knew for a fact someone broke into your house.”
My blood goes cold. “How do you know?” I ask. The words are a puff of air, not even a whisper. They aspire to be a whisper.
Ash goes over to where he dropped his jeans when we came out of the bedroom earlier. He finds his wallet in the pocket and opens it to pull out a piece of paper that he hands me.
I open the paper with shaking hands and read it. “You belong with me, not with him.”
I jerk my head up. “What is this?”
“I found that on your bed that night when I went into your house. Along with red rose petals,” he says.
It takes a second for his words to sink in and another three seconds for me to remember the dried rose petal I found on the floor under the kitchen sink the morning after the supposed break in.
I couldn’t conceive of where it came from unless one of the police officers tracked it inside that night, but the horrifying reality hits me like a sandbag to my stomach.
The entire world tilts sideways as my vision blurs and my legs give out. Strong arms catch me before I fall, and Ash scoops me up to carry me to the couch and lay me down.
“Oh my God,” I whisper.
“Gray, stay with me, baby.”
My eyes meet his. “Did you tell the police what you found?” I ask.
He looks at me apologetically. “No. I thought about it, but if I told the cops, they would’ve told you, and I was afraid it would fuck with your mind. I hoped the security team I hired would notice something and catch whoever broke in if they tried again.”
He’s right about one thing. Knowing the truth is completely fucking with my mind. Not only was someone in my house, but they went into my bedroom and put flower petals and a note on my bed.
The mental image of that alone sends me shooting off the couch toward the bathroom. I just barely make it to the toilet before I lose my battle with the soup, and it comes back up.
Ash is there a second later, and he pulls my hair away from my face as I retch into the toilet again. His hand rubs slow circles on my back.
“Easy now,” he says softly. “Just breathe.”
The toilet flushes, sending the contents of my stomach down the drain, and I pull back enough so I don’t get a face full of toilet spray.
Part of me would give anything to unlearn what I just learned, and I rest my head on my forearm as I lean over Ash’s toilet again.
“How are you doing?” he asks a few seconds later. His hand still makes slow circles over my back.
“Your toilet is clean at least,” I say weakly.
Seriously, that’s a blessing. I’ve been in the bathrooms of men who live alone, and they’re not always pretty.
“The housekeeper came today,” he says.
Of course he has a housekeeper. Apparently I’m the only one who doesn’t.
“Are you done?” Ash asks. “Do you want to get up?”
I pull my head off my forearm and spit bile into the bowl. Ash gets up from the floor and pulls me to my feet. He helps me to the sink where I swish my mouth with water.
“I wasted your soup,” I say as I lean over the basin.
“I can make more.”
I lift my head and look at him in the mirror. There’s concern written all over his face and perhaps a bit of fear. I want to be angry with him for not telling me about the rose petals and the note, but the intensity of my reaction suggests his decision to keep it from me wasn’t entirely bad.
I feel his hand rest on my hip, and I look down at it in the mirror. The touch isn’t sexual. It’s meant to be comforting, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be comfortable again.
I consider pulling his hand off me and laying into him for keeping secrets, but ultimately he came clean. If I punish him now for telling me the truth, he’ll be more reluctant to do it in the future.
I don’t have the energy to be mad at him anyway. I’m too terrified. Instead of pushing him away, I turn around and throw myself against him. Ash wraps his arms around me as I take deep breaths, refusing to cry.
“What am I supposed to do?” I ask. “Is it too late to go to the police?”
“We can tell the police if you want,” he says. “I took a picture of the bed so we’d have a record.”
We. He says it like this is his problem too.
Then it hits me that he has a picture of the bed. The request to see it jumps to the tip of my tongue, but I bite it back. Part of me wants to see the picture, but a much larger part isn’t prepared to see what some sick fuck did to my bed when I wasn’t there.
I suck in a breath as the other implications hit me. “Oh God.”
“What is it?” he asks.
I shake my head against his chest. “I just realized I need to count my underwear and my, um…toys when I get home.”
When I get home…What the hell am I thinking? I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to go home again after all this.
I pull back from Ash. “Can you come back to my place with me? I need to grab some clothes.”
I let go and move past him into the hall. A few seconds ago, I wasn’t sure my legs would hold me. Now I’m mobilized with urgent purpose.
“I need to call my mother to see if I can stay at her place for a few days,” I say, more to myself than Ash.
The words alone threaten to make me queasy again, but I swallow down the new feeling of dread at the thought of having to move back in with my parents.
Maybe Celena can put me up for a little while.
I jerk to a stop in the hall as Ash catches my wrist and spins me back around to face him.
“You’re not staying with your parents,” Ash says. “We can go get some of your clothes, but you’re coming back here to stay with me.”
My mouth slowly falls open as I stare up at him. Then I shake my head. “No, I can’t. It’s-”
“It’s non-negotiable,” he interrupts.
“But-”
“Gray, don’t make me tie you to the bed again,” he says.
I snap my mouth shut, although as threats go, I’m not sure that’s an effective one.
“Come on,” Ash says as he pulls me toward the living room. “Let’s get dressed and go pick up some things from your place. Looks like we’re starting the cohabitation part of this relationship early.”