Chapter Seven #3
My hands fell, gripping the edges of the couch cushion as he loomed over me, his shadow shielding me from the rest of the world.
“Do you not want me to ask you questions?” My voice was barely above a whisper, my heart drumming in my ears.
He said nothing, pinning me in place with his gentle stare.
I didn’t know what to do or how to act. Which presented a major problem, because I prided myself on knowing just what to do and just how to act to please everyone around me.
Making people comfortable was a bad habit I’d been chipping away at, layer by layer, since I came here.
I wanted my new life to be filled with only good memories, but as the days went on, I realized that life wasn’t life unless there was a little bit of bad.
A balance. If there was only good, it would be a fairy tale—and fairy tales were fictional.
“I need you to tell me what you want,” he murmured. “And if you don’t know what you want from me, then let me go.”
Let him go? The thought of him leaving again formed a pit in my stomach.
“I don’t want you to disappear again,” I blurted.
Ash stared at me for a moment, blinking once, then twice before he said, “I’m not going anywhere. I’m back and I’m here to stay.”
I stood, my lips inches from his now. “Promise me. Promise me you won’t go away again.”
“With my job—”
“Then promise me you’ll always come back,” I cut him off, pressing my hands against my stomach. “I can’t—I don’t want to be the reason you stopped living your life.”
“Never had a life to begin with,” he replied instantly, regret curling in his brows immediately after.
A second later, the power went out, leaving us drenched in the glow of my candles, causing shadows of worry to deepen across his face. He looked up to the ceiling and then to the light switches on the wall. “Does this kind of thing happen often after storms?” he asked, moving away from me.
I moved to one of the windows, watching the storm hang over the mountains, moving on. “During storms, yes. Probably three out of five storms will cause the power to trip. The last electrician I had up here said the power lines were incredibly dated, and it was something I just needed to expect.”
He leaned down to access the antique light switch before looking at me over his shoulder. “Where’s your breaker panel?”
“Oh, um, through the kitchen. There’s a small utility room. It’s on the right wall.”
He was gone before I’d finished speaking, moving through my house as if he was on a mission.
I looked down at my now-cold cup of tea and sighed.
It was going to take me at least a week to get back into the swing of things.
My temple was still throbbing, and I needed to take a scalding-hot shower.
I still had to work tomorrow, and I’d have to face Marg.
“Do you have a backup generator?” he asked as he came back into the living room.
Shaking my head, I told him what the electrician told me. “Uh, he said there’s no guarantee it would kick on due to the old wires throughout the house.”
“What did you call him out here for in the first place?”
I swallowed. “To install a generator.”
He let out a deep sigh, turned his head, and muttered yet another thing under his breath.
Annoyance glided across my shoulders, slick and oily.
“It would be best,” I began softly, my voice unsteady, “if you didn’t say things about me to yourself.
If you have something to say, regardless of my feelings, I wish for you to say them to my face. ”
He straightened and turned to me with pinched brows and thin lips. “I didn’t say anything about you.”
I shifted my weight, skin tingling. “Oh.”
Tipping his head to the wall, he folded his arms over his chest. “This town is the oldest in the state. This house is probably over a century old, yes?”
“One hundred and eight years,” I told him, nodding.
“Old towns have old shit. The man you hired was probably local, which means he knows this house. That also means he sees this shit as a lost cause because you live here alone and he made the judgment that you probably couldn’t afford the price he would charge—overcharge—for parts and labor.”
I flinched, my jaw going slack. “He—he—”
“Generators are easy to install, and if you intend on staying here for a while, you’ll need one to compete with the storms. And the winters.”
“Last winter wasn’t bad,” I noted. “I made it out just fine.”
He clicked his tongue and looked at the fireplace. “Did you sleep down here when the temperature dropped to below freezing?”
Once.
During the ice storm from hell in January.
“I do if I have to,” I confessed.
“You shouldn’t have to sleep on the floor because some fuck of a bastard is too lazy to do what he was hired to fucking do,” he said, his voice growing harder with every word. “I’ll be back tomorrow to take a look at your breaker panel. Then we can go from there.”
“That’s not necessary,” I began, but he stepped up to me, took my chin between his fingers, and my skin began to burn.
“If it concerns you and your safety, it absolutely is,” he murmured roughly. Then he blinked and dropped his hand, leaving behind an ache. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Please don’t apologize for that,” I cut him off.
He jerked. “I shouldn’t have touched you without your permission. I’m sorry.” After a few moments of thick silence, he asked, “You going to be okay here for the night, or do I need to get you a hotel room?”
I tripped over my words. “A-a what? A hotel room?”
He nodded.
“I don’t have the energy to pack a bag.”
“Right,” he muttered, giving me a small smile. It didn’t reach his eyes, and I highly doubted there was a shred of meaning behind it. “So you’re okay here?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to sleep with all eighty-six of those candles burning?”
I moved back and painfully watched as he did the same. “No,” I answered, my voice laced with confusion. “That’s a huge fire hazard. Why on earth would I do that?”
He nodded. “I was just checking. Make sure you blow them all out before heading upstairs, yeah? This house is too beautiful to be burned down.”
I was too stunned by his words to move. He thought my house was beautiful?
Our eyes met, and he tipped his head to me as he stepped back into the foyer. “Good night, Angel.”