Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
SHILOH
Reva cuts out of the bathroom looking like a woman who forgot where she left her own skin.
I’m leaning against the wall with two beers in my hands—one for me, one for her—because I’d been working up to something. Taking my time. Letting the night build the way it should.
But that girl’s not walking like a woman who just took a pee and washed her hands.
Her expression’s dark and a little frantic.
Hair disheveled in an unmistakable way that makes my mouth water.
The hallway spits her from near-gloom into amber light, casting shadows across her features.
Her lips are swollen, like she’s been kissed too hard.
Her pupils are blown wide, and her hands keep lifting to her throat, then dropping to her wrist, like she’s checking for something.
Checking to see if she’s still together. Still in one piece.
The facts rattle clinically inside my head before they form a picture—before they make coherence—and the tension in my chest spreads out like armor.
The question isn’t really whether Reva had some kind of…interaction…in that bathroom. It’s whether she was willing or unwilling. Either possibility makes my fingers clench around the bottle necks.
Because I was right here. I was right goddamn here.
But someone else was here, too.
I draw in a slow breath. Something tells me I’m gonna need every bit of defense I can scrape together when it comes to Reva Leigh Hart—aka McEntire—and I haven’t even known her for twelve hours.
But I know enough. I didn’t stumble upon Reva by accident. Coming up on her on the highway was the product of an SOS sent by her guardian, Cal, who was just paranoid enough to tag her location.
He had panicked when he saw how far south she’d traveled from Chicago, and reached out to my friend, asking us to keep an eye on her.
Did that mean fuck her? Probably not.
I wasn’t gonna lose sleep over it, though.
It kind of looked like someone might have beat me to it, though, and the thought of that makes me want to curl my fingers around someone’s neck and squeeze.
“Everything okay?” I ask low as she nears, holding out a beer like it’s normal. My gaze snags on a red mark on her neck before I lift my beer to my lips and force my eyes to continue moving.
She glances up, a bit of surprise in her expression before she locks it down. Recognition flares. Her swollen lips part and then pry into a trembling smile as her gaze slips away, tracking the bar almost desperately.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
The answer comes too fast.
She takes the beer—thankful, nervous—and guzzles it down in a few hard swallows like it’s oxygen.
The shift from carefree to brittle and wary is immediate and unmistakable, and I battle back a wave of protective instinct that flares like sunrise against the night. Because her reply is reflex, not truth.
As I watch, she inhales and blows the breath out, then licks her lips. She runs her free hand around the back of her neck, then nods to herself.
Setting the beer down, she steps into me. I hold still, barely breathing, as her hands find my shirt and latch tight. She lifts onto the tips of her toes and her lips seek mine—like she’s aiming for something, like she needs to pin me down to reality.
The first brush of her—the taste—intoxicates my grip on sanity and changes it. Warps it.
She’s heat and life and clutches on to me like she’s holding tight to a lifeline. Her fingernails rake gently at my chest through the fabric of my shirt, and I want nothing more than to feel them against my bare skin.
No…it’s not that I want it. I need it.
Her energy infuses me along with her scent—and underneath that, something else.
A richer musk. A wrongness. A layer that doesn’t match the rhythm we had on the dance floor.
My jaw tightens. I understand, on some base level, what she’s trying to do. She’s trying to decide if I’m as real as whatever happened in that bathroom.
My arms band around her waist on instinct to keep her close.
Or maybe she’s trying to convince herself of something else. Scrub it away.
The tunes change behind us, the seething tide of people a blanket of heat and noise. But this isn’t seduction. It’s not play.
It feels like… a rewrite.
My instincts flare hotter as I kiss her back, tongue gliding against her lips before she opens for me with a sigh. I scan for answers—her breath, her tremble, the faint vibration of panic at the edges of her arousal—
What the hell happened in that bathroom?
I pull my mouth off hers just enough to look at her. While I’m holding her, my eyes travel. Over her shoulder. Past her hair. Past the hallway.
Into the bar.
I sweep faces. Hands. Shadows near the bathroom door. Men standing too still. Men watching too hard. My pulse ticks up, that old animal part of me waking and stretching.
A growl burns my throat, and my hands curl into her shirt. The moment she pulls back, I let her go, releasing her into the space between us before I do something stupid.
Reva stares at me in a way that makes my stomach dip, and I force a half-smile to my lips, allowing it settle into my trademark charming grin.
“What’s the matter, Yank? Do I kiss that bad?”
She’s looking at me like she’s trying to place my features in a memory—one that doesn’t belong to me.
Her brows furrow. The next wave of laughter sharpens her expression, juts out her chin. She’s barely in control, and the shadows underneath her eyes are hollow.
“No! You kiss…I…we should go,” she says roughly.
I give a single sharp nod. The only thing I know for certain is the need to get Reva safely out of the bar and figure out what the fuck just happened—without lighting her up so bad she bolts.
I shake it off, shielding the flaring need to simultaneously protect her and throw her over my shoulder. “Sure thing. Whatever you want.”
My fingers brush the small of her back—gentle but firm—Reva moving where I guide her like she’s half asleep, half feral. The rest of the bar melts away, and any lightheartedness I’d been wearing drops like a discarded sweater.
Her gaze latches on her feet. One in front of the other.
Mine doesn’t. Mine keeps cutting left and right, cataloging.
Who was close enough. Who moved when she disappeared. Who’s watching her walk out like she’s prey.
Outside, the mugginess of the night wraps around us. I pull open the truck door and boost her up with a hand to her elbow. “In you go.”
In the cab, silence stretches.
Reva’s spine remains rigid. Upright. Her stare fixes on something through the windshield like she expects it to move. High beams illuminate a curving blacktop drawing us away from the comforting lights of the bar and into the unknown.
I shouldn’t have left her alone to grab drinks. But I did. And now I’ve got questions I don’t like.
I glance sideways. I need to get her back on solid ground, which means I need to get her thinking about something else. “You were dancing in there like you were fightin’ ghosts. Somebody teach you those killer moves?”
She forces out a laugh that isn’t a laugh. “Maybe I was fighting ghosts. I’ve seen enough of them.”
Not what I expected. The way she says it lands heavy. She turns fast enough to send my gut into a high dive, and her voice drops low with her next question.
“Shiloh…were you…did we…” She trails off.
My grip tightens on the wheel.
So that’s what this is. Something happened, and until she saw me standing there with those beers, she thought it was me.
“Did we what, sweetheart?” My hand flexes on the wheel, but I keep my voice steady. Even. Like I’m not half hard and half pissed off and trying to decide who deserves my anger more—whoever touched her, or her for not knowing the difference.
She swallows. Her attention lands south on my mouth, then to my hands—one on the wheel, one resting near the console. If she’s looking for proof…
“You know, in there. Before I—” She stops and her jaw tightens hard enough to crack. “Never mind.”
Her quicksilver grin is there and gone fast enough I almost think I imagined it.
“Talk about ghosts.”
Reva strikes me as a competent woman who’d rather kick an ass than kiss one—even her own. Now her behavior is split in a way I’m struggling to justify. She’s acting like we already crossed a line we can’t come back from, and I know good and goddamn well I didn’t cross it in there.
I know what she’s really asking.
Her scent confirms it—the musky layer clinging to her, the added pink in her cheeks that doesn’t read like beer and dancing. She’s asking if she had sex with me tonight.
A low throb hums through me and leaves bristling anger in its wake—the kind I know better than to unleash when a woman’s already on a knife edge. My grip chokes around the steering wheel as if plastic and metal might warp beneath my fingers.
“We kissed,” I say, keeping my voice easy so I don’t spook her. “Back there. That’s it.”
Reva stills, and in the flash of the next light something like confusion and dread flicker across her face.
“Right. Good. Because I don’t actually… I—” She cuts herself off and covers whatever she wanted to say with sarcasm. “Whatever.”
My instincts ramp up like a cattle prod straight to my brain. I slide my hand down the console toward her—brush her knee first, asking permission.
When she doesn’t move away, I grab her thigh and squeeze once. A reminder. A grounding.
Also—if I’m honest—a warning to myself.
Because I want her. Bad. And tonight was supposed to be mine.
Someone scared her, though. Someone got too close. I stroke her thigh lightly with my thumb, the motion soothing. Settling.
How the fuck did they manage it when I stood there the entire time—except for the minute I went to get a drink?
“Sweetheart, did something happen back there? Do I need to find someone and have a come to Jesus talk with him? Just tell me—“
“No!”
Reva pulls her leg away, crosses it over the other, squeezing tight. She bites down on her lip and a flush travels from her cheeks down her neck. The air in the cab goes tight and unbreathable.
The shift is palpable.
The change in her scent. The blush. The tightness in her chest that pokes her nipples out beneath the fabric of her shirt.
She’s turned on—shamefully, violently—and it’s making her react instead of think.
“No?” I pressed. “Are you sure? I won’t be mad, I just—”
She shakes her head. “No. Nothing happened.”
The hotel parking lot is only half filled—cars parked too close to their lines, families tucked in uncomfortable beds, exhausted. I’ve gone the opposite direction, and now I’m bringing her back to a door that won’t keep anything out if the wrong thing wants in.
Adrenaline surges through me. My mind races to make sense of the facts I’ve ordered neatly. They still don’t equate to much. I’ve got an answer, but it isn’t one I like.
Someone accosted Reva in the bathroom. Someone slipped right beneath my watchful gaze and turned her on—touched her, stole her breath away and put a shine in her eyes.
And it sure as shit wasn’t me, no matter what she tried to tell herself.
She points me toward the entrance closest to her room. I snag a spot across the way, far enough away I’m uncomfortable letting her traverse the shadows alone.
No headlights followed us from the bar, but I know better than most: the real monsters don’t need headlights.
I head around to open the door for her, falling into step beside her. She stops and glares up at me. “You don’t have to walk me to my door, you know.”
“I’m walking you to your fucking door.”
She stomps away, muttering something indistinguishable, and I follow. Into the hotel, up a floor, down the hall. At her door, I stand and wait while she fumbles for her keycard like her hands refuse to obey. Like she’s still somewhere else, half in that bathroom, half in her own head.
I take the keycard from her trembling fingers and swipe it, the light switching from red to green, then push the door open. I sigh.
“Something happened to you back there,” I say.
She stares silently at the door.
“I don’t know what it was—well, I take that back. I have a pretty good idea, and I’m kicking my own ass for leaving you alone for a second. I’m pretty sure the last thing you want is for me to come in, but I really don’t want to leave you like this—”
I can’t help it—there’s a faint bite beneath the words. I’m not mad at her. Not really.
More at the whole situation. I was supposed to be keeping an eye on her. Protecting her—from what, I’m not completely sure of. But I was supposed to be watching out.
So I’m mad.
Mad at whoever got around me, upended what I was working for, touched this girl without her explicit consent. Because I know she wouldn’t have consented if she hadn’t thought it was me there with her in that bathroom.
She freezes, glancing over her shoulder at me, turning me into a trap or a lifeline. Her tongue darts out to brush across her lower lip and the action snags my attention. My cock wakes up, stupid with anticipation.
Silence stretches.
Then she laughs once, sharp. “That’s the thing, Shiloh. I don’t know what I want.”
She pushes the door open a little further.
“But I don’t think I want you to leave me like this, either.”