“Hard to tell with her head down, but yeah, I think so,” I responded.
As we came back around, I watched her again. She lifted her head and looked right at us. Why was she watching us? Something didn’t feel right about the situation, but I told the nagging in my gut to shut up. As the last few seconds passed that she was in view, I observed her closely. Did she just smirk?
I was being shaken awake. My eyes flew open and my heart was pounding in my chest. Where the fuck was I? The last time I didn’t know my surroundings was back in the desert. Going on high alert, my body acted on instinct. The same nudging that brought me out of my sleep pushed at my shoulder again. Grabbing the person by their upper arms, I quickly shoved them down on the floor and straddled them, incapacitating them from any movement.
I always kept a small pocket knife at my side. My adrenaline pumping and still not recognizing where I was, I pulled it out, flipped the blade open and held it to the throat of the person underneath me. My hand was greeted by soft flesh and a gasp that came out more feminine than I expected. Focusing my eyes on the face below me, I noted the terrified hazel eyes staring up at me. Kat held her hands off to the side, palms open, in a gesture of surrender.
“Shit,” was all I could say.
My entire body was being pressed into the hard flooring and Timber was on top of me with a knife at my neck. His eyes were absolutely wild and unrecognizable. I was scared out of my mind, but I also knew somehow that he would never hurt me. What a strange thing to be thinking when there was a blade pressed into my skin.
I watched as his eyes cleared and he really looked at me now. “Shit,” he breathed.
“Timber?” I barely whispered.
His blade dropped out of his hand and made a clinking noise when it hit the ground. He looked like he was about to be sick. Swallowing hard, his eyes searched all over my face and then down to my neck.
“Oh, Christ, what’d I do?” He was speaking so low I could hardly hear him.
Very tentatively I reached up to touch his cheek. As soon as my fingers made contact with his skin, he shoved off of me so fast you would have thought I burned him. The pained expression from his eyes made my heart ache.
“Timber?” I asked again, just a little louder.
He paced back and forth a few times before he stopped and looked at the ground. He ran his hands through his hair and sighed. I was still lying completely motionless on the ground, unsure of what to do next. Slowly he brought his eyes back to me. His features hardened and I knew he’d officially shut me out.
“You okay?” His tone was clipped.
I barely nodded my head.
“Good. I’ve got to go.” He grabbed his keys from the kitchen counter and walked out the door before I even had a chance to process what just happened. Slowly rolling over onto my stomach, I laid my head on my forearms.
What the fuck just happened here? I barely remembered anything about last night. When I woke up I had looked around my still darkened room. My stomach had rolled from the alcohol. I was never drinking tequila again! On my bedside table there had been a glass of water and two aspirin. Sitting up in my bed, I had seen two very large feet hanging over the arm of the couch and I had somehow known they belonged to Timber. That thought warmed me. He stayed with me last night to watch over me. I’d never had a guy do that before- well besides Roger, but that didn’t count. After taking the medicine, I had gone and perched myself on the edge of the coffee table and stole a few moments to watch him sleep. His brows had been furrowed and he was apparently dreaming about something. My initial thought was, ‘how cute, he can even look grumpy in his sleep.’ It stopped being cute when he started shaking his head back and forth, mumbling incoherently. It didn’t take long before he started thrashing around. I tried to wake him by calling his name, but it wasn’t working. Even as I jostled his shoulder, he wouldn’t open his eyes. Then all of a sudden he did, and I found myself pinned beneath him with a knife to my neck. I don’t even know how he moved that fast. An average person would have been terrified of dying in that moment, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t scared for me at all. I was scared for him. I’d never seen a man look as lost as he did. It took my breath away.
I’d wanted to fix him. My desire was so strong — just to wrap my arms around him and whisper ‘It’ll be okay, you’re safe’ in his ear. He pulled away from me before I got a chance to do more than touch his cheek. His warmth had seeped through me, and now that he wasn’t here, I felt cold and bereft. It made me want to cry. How did I got from being skeptical of his intentions to wanting to give him my shoulder and fix him?