Why Resist a Rebel - By Leah Ashton Page 0,54

he raked his fingers through his hair, making one side stand up on end.

He looked—awful. Worse than she’d ever seen him, despite the much-needed weight she’d noticed he’d put on in the past few weeks.

The shadows beneath his eyes were verging on black, and his eyes were rimmed red.

He looked exhausted. Broken. Ruined.

Of course it wasn’t a surprise.

But she’d made herself ignore it. She hadn’t wanted to know.

It didn’t fit with what she’d decided was allowable between them. This was far, far too serious.

‘Oh, Dev...’

She went to his side, automatically wrapping her arm around his shoulder. She crouched awkwardly beside the cistern but didn’t care. She had to do something.

But he shrugged her off.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, angrily. Much louder than she expected. It made her want to back away, but she didn’t let herself.

‘No,’ she said, ‘you’re not.’

He looked away—at the towel rail. At nothing.

‘I’m just having trouble sleeping,’ he said, all dismissive. ‘That’s all.’

She glanced at the sink. A tray of tablets lay almost empty on the counter top.

‘It’s not good for you to use those for too long,’ she began.

He stood up abruptly, crossing the room. ‘I know that,’ he said. He was looking at himself in the mirror, as if he hated what he saw.

Ruby straightened, but didn’t go to him.

‘Without them I just don’t sleep. I can’t.’

‘Okay.’

He looked at her, his gaze unbelievably intense. ‘If I don’t take them, I don’t sleep. And if I don’t sleep, I can’t—’

Act.

He snatched at something. Two tablets, she realised, sitting on the ceramic counter.

Right in her line of sight. As if he’d been staring at them.

For how long?

He tossed them at his mouth, then wrenched the tap on, gathering water in his cupped hands that he tipped haphazardly down his throat.

Everything inside her screamed at her to leave.

She’d decided she didn’t want this. This was supposed to be fun, and flirty, and temporary.

Nothing that was happening right now was any of those things.

‘Can you please leave?’ he said, meeting her gaze in the mirror.

Because he asked, she nodded.

But she didn’t go very far. Not to her car, and certainly not back home to her apartment.

Instead, she shut the bathroom door behind her, and crawled straight back into Dev’s bed.

She didn’t know what she was doing, or what she could offer him.

But tonight, she was not walking away.

After Ruby left, Dev spent long minutes in the bathroom, waiting for his whirring brain to slow.

He’d known she hadn’t meant to stay, but when she had, he’d been glad.

Really glad.

Stupid, really.

Because what did it matter? Filming ended in two weeks, and then he’d fly back to LA. And Ruby would... He didn’t even know. That was how transient this relationship was.

But even so, he’d tried again. Tried to sleep like a normal person. To fall asleep beside Ruby.

Predictably, just like last week in that fancy penthouse, sleep hadn’t come. But tonight he’d really resisted the tablets.

Tonight he’d thought it might be different.

Why?

Just like how the mornings hadn’t been any different? The one single variation from the murky fog that was his mornings was last Sunday, when he’d woken beside Ruby. And even that had only worked because he’d been fortunate she’d slept in so late. He’d been nearly normal.

He’d hoped that would become the norm, but it hadn’t. Nights were hard. Mornings even worse. It was a constant, awful cycle of frustration—and in between he managed to be to all appearances a fully functional human being.

A miracle, probably, that on this film at least he could hide whatever the hell was wrong with him. He could hide it from Ruby.

Until tonight. Tonight he’d done a really crap job of hiding it.

He didn’t think Ruby would be coming back tomorrow night. This wasn’t what she’d signed up for.

He pushed the door open, not bothering to switch off the light. The bathroom light flooded the room, and the obvious feminine shape on the bed.

For a minute or more he just stood there, then gave his increasingly blurry head a shake, and switched off the light.

In the gloom he slid onto his side of the bed, and without letting himself think too much—and quite frankly with the drugs unable to do much thinking anyway—he reached for her.

She wasn’t asleep, he realised, and she turned to face him in his arms.

‘I’m fine,’ he whispered into her hair.

‘I want you to be,’ she said, her breath tickling his chest.

And then his eyes slid shut, but a moment before the thick blackness of drugged sleep enveloped him