Bound by Danger (The Alliance #6) - Brenda K. Davies Page 0,64
the door, she leaned against it as she took in the ivory walls, red towels, and the single toothbrush sitting on the sink beside a tube of toothpaste.
It was all so foreign and cold. She was here, with Lucien, but she felt utterly alone as she used the bathroom and washed her hands. When she turned the water off, she lifted her eyes to study her reflection in the mirror. She was far paler than normal, and her hands had a tremble that she couldn’t control.
She stood there as she gathered her courage to return to the bedroom. When she did, she discovered him sitting on the bed with his hands clasped between his legs and his head bowed. Something about him looked broken in a way she’d never seen before.
When Lucien lifted his head to take her in, he tried to quell the uneasiness churning in his gut. She exuded apprehension, and he sensed how much she didn’t like it here. What if she decided to leave?
He couldn’t let her go, she meant too much to him, but he couldn’t make her stay against her will. He couldn’t make her unhappy by forcing her to stay, but if she left, it would destroy him.
Callie stared into his black eyes. Since he helped her from the SUV, his eyes had shifted back to black and remained that way. He was more relaxed here than she’d ever seen him while she felt jumpier than she ever had.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
Callie twisted her hands in front of her. She had been ravenous before they arrived, but she was too anxious to eat. “No. What am I going to do here?”
He pondered her question before replying. “I hope you’re going to find a home here.”
She didn’t know how to take that, but then, she wasn’t sure how to handle anything right now. It was all so strange; she was a fish out of water, except that a bunch of trained killers surrounded the fish.
“I don’t think I belong here,” she whispered.
Lucien felt as if she’d punched him, and he inwardly recoiled from her words, but the only response he showed to them was a clenching of his hands. “You don’t think you belong with me?”
Callie blinked at his strange response. “With you?”
Lucien rose from the bed and paced over to the window. He pulled back the curtains to reveal his view of the garden below. Before Kadence arrived, the garden was overgrown and ugly.
But Kadence, Simone, and some of the others had pruned, weeded, and planted it into shape. Now, it was beautiful, with its vast array of colors, plants, birds, and butterflies flitting around.
Before, he’d never looked at it, but since Kadence’s arrival, he often found himself admiring his view of it. He tried to let its beauty soothe the demon within him, but it refused to be appeased by plants. It wanted blood; it wanted her.
He settled the curtain back into place and turned to face her. “Yes, with me.”
Callie’s heart hammered with excitement and apprehension. Despite their awful start, this past week had been some of the best days of her life. However… “I barely know you.”
But that wasn’t entirely true. Over their time in the hotel, they’d shared a lot of their history. She’d revealed a lot to him, and he knew her as well as some of her closest friends, only a whole lot more intimately.
“No, that’s not right,” she said. “I’ve come to know you fairly well, but we haven’t known each other for long.”
“Does that matter?”
“Yes!”
And then she took the time to really consider his question. Did it matter?
So what if they only met each other a little over a week ago? In that time, she’d come to know him better than her high school boyfriend and her college one. And she felt a whole lot more for him than she had for either of them. She’d considered herself in love with them, but those feelings were a pale comparison to the ones Lucien evoked in her.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”
Lucien walked over to stand before her. Sensing her uncertainty, he rested his hands on her shoulders before pulling her close. He hugged her as she stood unmoving for a minute. Then her arms came around him, and her fingers bit into his back as she hugged him.
“Why don’t we take it one day at a time?” he suggested. “And see how it goes.”