"My fault, I'm still getting used to this." The handrails, wider halls, entry ramp at the back door, and outward-opening interior doors. Rhys and his perpetual dark moods. His legs, which didn't function the way they had before she'd fucked everything up.
He gave her a look she couldn't read. "You want me to come with you?"
God. No. Her breath hitched just at the thought.
"Lil-"
"I can't."
"Drive the fucking speed limit," he clipped. "Five miles under. And text me when you get there."
"Yes, boss." She kept her tone light to hide a chronic case of guilt and jogged down the stairs, out to her car before she chickened out and called a cab, which she sometimes did when the anxiety ran really hot.
Rhys didn't blame her for the crash. Exactly the opposite, his gruff order a reminder that the only vehicle she could control was her own. But even though the accident that had changed everything hadn't been her fault, she was haunted by everything she could have done differently.
Thankfully, the roads were mostly dead and worrying about the break-in kept her mind off driving.
Punk One, Purl Two, the yarn store she'd opened two months earlier, was her baby, the dream she'd finally realized after escaping a long, painfully controlling relationship. In many ways, the punk-rock-themed boutique defined her new life, a defiant middle finger in the face of social control over her existence. Freedom greeted her every morning in the guise of pointy needles and soft, cozy skeins of yarn. She'd found friendship in her small, but growing clientele and the people who staffed the neighboring businesses.
At her age, staring down the barrel at thirty, maybe she should have more to hold onto than a twelve-hundred-square-foot shop filled with fiber, but what she had was what she had. It was all she had.
The alarm system was more than she could afford even with the deal she'd received due to … who knew, but it was a big price break-she'd compared to other companies in the area. But she'd cut corners in order to pay for it because her ex's shadow haunted her.
Paul Phillips-former Dom, not ex-husband, thank God-had fought long and hard to keep her locked up in his sphere of control. He had the means to track her down if he wanted to. So far he hadn't, but she wouldn't put it past him to lash out at her here even though she was more than two thousand miles from Seattle.
So, expensive security. But mostly affordable because of the mysterious deal.
Halfway to the store, at a red light, she found herself thinking about Jude Burke. While she waited for the light to turn, she fired off a text.
Is it bad?
He responded immediately. Could be worse.
"I guess that's something," she muttered to the empty intersection. If Paul were going to chase her down and do damage, he wouldn't do a half-assed job. If Paul were after her, there'd be no "could be worse"-there'd be only "nothing's left." He wasn't the kind of man who easily let go of his property, which she'd stupidly allowed herself to become before realizing, after too many years, that some men used sexual power exchange as another label for abuse.
When she reached the narrow lot in front of her store, she had to navigate around three patrol cars and a dark blue SUV. She parked beside the SUV. By the time she climbed from her car, a man had appeared in the store's doorframe.
Bits of glass crunched beneath the soles of her flats as she studied him. Details registered by degrees, starting with the breadth of his shoulders. He filled the doorframe, and even though she couldn't make out the ridges and ripples of muscle, she knew he'd been put together by the kind of genetic bricks most men couldn't come close to imitating, no matter how much gym time they put in or how many protein shakes they consumed.
Her footsteps slowed as she registered what he was wearing, a t-shirt under an open button-down, cargo pants instead of police blues. And she knew, before he even opened his mouth, that this was the man whose husky bedroom voice had brought her down from her nightmare. Whose steady, certain command had pulled her back from the brink of a panic attack.
Against the soft yellow backdrop of the warm light she'd chosen for the shop, he glowed. More details, and she stopped. Just stopped right there, two feet away from him, as though her brain couldn't process him and operate her legs at the same time.
His hair, the nighttime scruff on his jaw, looked like a tawny lion's mane, and despite the tense circumstances that had brought him from his bed, he held his big, solid frame with the lazy, powerful grace of a large cat.
For a moment, she wasn't standing in a chilly night, underdressed and shivering. Looking at him, fluid and solid at the same time, made her mouth dry and her core wet.