Not with Dani in the bed in front of me in almost nothing. Not with Dani needing protection from some obsessed maniac. I’d already locked every single lock on the door and checked the windows. The vents were far enough away with a weave on the grate small enough it would be almost impossible to slide a scope through. It was overkill. But my mind had been programmed to think this way, and the worst thing you could do was to take your enemy for granted.
My thoughts from earlier swirled through me again. None of the notes had been signed. Nothing truly tied the attacks back to Fiona. Images of our time at the restaurant replayed in my mind. Every inch. Every face. Every body. There’d been five men from the detail there. The super twins, two I barely knew, and Tanner. Tanner was an asshole, but I was pretty sure that was just because he hated me taking over and showing him his failures. It had nothing to do with Dani, but then again, this had started with Brady, and I wasn’t sure what any of their relationships had been like before Dani and I had come on board.
“You don’t have to sleep in the chair,” Dani’s voice broke into my thoughts. “You can sleep on the bed.” Her eyes were closed, and her voice sounded slow, slightly slurred as she started to fall asleep.
“I’m good,” I told her.
“I’m not contagious. I don’t have cooties. You can’t catch Dani cooties from sleeping in a bed with me and clean sheets,” she said, her lips quirked up at the corners like she was smirking at me even half asleep.
My lips quirked a return answer, even as the truth settled in. I already had Dani cooties. There were all kinds of Dani cooties crawling under and over my skin. And damn if those cooties weren’t enticing enough to make me want to forget reality, a promise to a dead brother, and promises to myself about my job and relationships. It made me want to forget everything but the skin of the woman who smelled like sunshine and honey and a childhood I’d all but forgotten about.
A childhood spent at a home I would be sharing with someone for the first time in my adult life. I’d never taken anyone there. Darren had known about it, but he’d never seen it firsthand. Not once. It wasn’t a place I chose to spend my time. I hadn’t been back in three years, even when Maribelle had begged.
Guilt hit me at thoughts of Maribelle.
While I watched, Dani’s smile softened, followed by her entire face, until I knew she was asleep. The slow rhythm of her chest against the sheets was like a timepiece waving in front of my face, hypnotizing me, pulling me under until my eyes closed, and I let myself doze off. A few minutes of surrender before I’d be on high alert again. At least, until I got her somewhere safe.
When I woke, the room was still dark, but since we hadn’t shut the curtains, I could see the sky turning a deep midnight blue instead of the black shadow it had been. My eyes went right back to Dani. She was in the exact same position she’d been in when I’d closed my eyes a few hours before. She’d been exhausted, her body and mind worn out, the emotions that had coursed through her almost as draining as the ipecac syrup.
I took a quick shower, and when I came out, she was sitting in the desk chair at her laptop again. She had her long, dark waves pulled over one shoulder, baring her neck on the side closest to me. Her eyes were trained on the screen, but since I’d opened the bathroom door, she’d pulled her shoulders back, straightening, showing no cracks in her veneer.
I wanted to kiss the soft flesh facing me until she let the veneer fall away. Until she was reaching for me and my body and forgetting everything else but her and me and the way we moved together. Instead, I did what I was good at. I boxed up those emotions and slammed them into the footlocker deep inside me.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
She glanced over at me, then away, and then her eyes came back, taking me in from the top of my wet, dark hair down to my tacticalboots. She assessed me in the way I often did her. Weighing. Classifying. Trying to pinpoint the thing about her that was driving me insane with need.
“I’m actually starving, but I’m not ready to put food into my stomach yet,” she said. “You aren’t in cargo pants.”
I looked down at the jeans I was wearing. They were worn and comfortable.
“I do own civilian clothes,” I said with a half-smile.
“This might be only the second time I’ve ever seen you in them,” she said, turning back to her screen with a hard swallow that made her throat move up and down. It was good to know she was struggling against desire as much as I was. I wasn’t the only one waging an internal war.
After spending an hour on the computer and her phone, breaking Brady’s disappearing act to the world, she got ready for the day. Every time I heard a noise in the bathroom, all I could see was her naked frame in the shower all over again.
Her perfect curves. Her perfect skin. Her perfectly kissable lips.
Mac’s name lighting up my screen reminded me of exactly what he’d do to me if he knew where my thoughts had gone.
“Yeah,” I said.
“What’s going on?” The demand in Mac’s voice was both expected and humorous until my thoughts went to Dani vomiting in a bathroom stall.
“What do you know, and what do you need to know?” I asked.
“Damnit, Nash. You went down there to protect them, and now Brady is canceling concerts and disappearing. What the hell is going on?”
The bathroom door opened, and Dani emerged in the white sundress she’d worn for about a minute the day before. It made her tanned skin stand out as if it were glimmering with fairy dust in the half-light of the hotel room.
“Dani hasn’t told you?” I asked, surprised.
She froze and then started waving her head and her hands in a wild “no” fashion.
“Told me what?” Mac asked.
I sat down, running a finger along the scar that was hidden under my T-shirt.
