Lucius (Acquisition Series #4) - Celia Aaron Page 0,35
as he lays me on my bed. “Is this—” He pulls my gun from beneath my pillow and checks the chamber. “You keep a loaded gun under your pillow?”
I shrug.
He shrugs, too. “I’m not judging. Just don’t accidentally shoot yourself.” He replaces it, then pulls my blanket over me.
“I can’t sleep with you here.”
“Okay.” He turns and walks out of my room.
Even in my drunken haze, I sit up and try to see where he’s gone. Did he leave like I said? Ah, shit, the bastard is back, and now he’s carrying a water.
“Drink.” He sits beside me and presses the bottle into my hands. “You’ll thank me in the morning.”
“I’ll never thank you.”
“Okay.”
“Stop saying ‘okay.’”
“Okay.”
Maddening, infuriating, asshole. He stares until I take the water and start drinking.
“Good girl.”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I was not prepared for what those words from his lips would do to me. I drink more and look anywhere but at him.
He leaves again, and I’m too fucking tired to care if he’s raiding my pantry or stealing my leftovers, so I lie back down. After a short while, I hear him cleaning up the glass.
This is how I know I’m fucking drunk off my ass. In this weird drunk reality, Lucius Vinemont is in my apartment. He’s not trying to kill me. In fact, he’s doctoring my foot, making sure I hydrate, and cleaning up my mess. Yep, in real life, I’m probably passed out on the bathroom floor in a pool of my own vomit.
“Go back to sleep.”
“Whoa, where’d you come from?” I look up to find him leaning on my bedroom door frame.
“Been here for two hours now, Evie. You’ve been snoring for the past hour of it. Then you stopped. What woke you? A dream?”
What? “I don’t snore.”
“Okay.”
“Shut up.” I turn my head to the side and close my eyes.
“Evie.” Lucius’s voice. That mix of silken and deadly and deep.
“What?” I keep my eyes shut tight as my head starts to pound.
“Sun’s up. Your hangover cocktail is beside you. Try not to get into any more trouble, would you darlin’? And lockup when I leave.” Footsteps recede, and then I hear my front door close.
I crack my eyes open and quickly shut them again. Did … Did Lucius spend the night in my apartment? Holy shit. I press my palms to my forehead and groan as I remember bits and pieces of last night. I made mistake after mistake, the biggest one being that I let Lucius in. What was I thinking?
My foot aches dully, but my head is worse. I take a peek at my nightstand and find a neat line of pills and a glass with some sort of concoction in it. Trusting it seems unwise of me. Then again, Lucius was here all night and didn’t so much as touch me after I got into bed.
In fact … I slept better than I have in a long time. But that must’ve just been the booze. Had to be. Like Lucius said, I’m a lightweight.
I roll over and grab the pills, pop them into my mouth, then drink them down. When I lie back, the room swims for a second, then settles down. It takes a while, but my thoughts finally start to coalesce into some semblance of sense. And then it hits me all over again—the party is tonight.
Screaming and crying aren’t going to stop it from happening. Nothing will. I sit up and breathe through a few pounding aches in my skull that fade slowly.
I still can’t believe Lucius was here all night. What did he do? Sleep? I stand up, his tie still wrapped tightly around my injured foot, and walk into the living room. The couch doesn’t look particularly rumpled. No, he didn’t sleep.
Turning back around, I walk into my bedroom and stop. My heart does a stutter step, and I blink hard to make sure I’m seeing clearly. I am. I rush to my dresser and pull open the top drawer.
The black envelope is there, in the same place I’d left it. But I know. I know he searched through my things and found it. Maybe that’s the reason he came here all along. He just got lucky that I was drunk enough to let him in without a fight. God, I’m making the same mistakes. That foolish little girl inside me is still pushing me in the wrong direction.
I back away and sit on my bed as the early rays of sunlight fight their