Finding Him (Covet #2) - Rachel Van Dyken Page 0,25
finished over an hour ago, and all I kept thinking was that Noah had been a lucky bastard and where the hell do I get some Hawaiian shorts so she laughs with me like that?
Her laughter was musical, and when she talked about him, her eyes lit up like shiny blue crystals. That man had earned every single laugh just like she earned every single tear she refused to shed. She held him up on this perfect pedestal, and I wondered what it would feel like to be talked about that way. The way she described Noah, the way I talked about my mom. What would people say about me? The thought was uncomfortable, to say the least. My father had done an excellent job of smearing my name all over even though most people knew it was his jealousy speaking. Bridge and I were doing better financially than he ever did, and he knew it.
I needed to be alone with my thoughts, so I made an excuse about going outside to check for better cell reception.
The snow still hadn’t melted, but at least the sun was out, and I wondered how long we would have to wait before we could leave and if it made me a selfish bastard to wish for just one more day, maybe two, where it was just us, no outside world.
The business side of my brain was panicking that I wasn’t stressing over a quiet cell phone, but my soul for the first time in years felt settled. I had no idea if the feeling would follow me back into the city, but I highly doubted it.
There was a reason we had a cabin, after all.
Silence.
Privacy.
I looked down at my cell and waited for a bar to pop up. My signal wasn’t strong, but at least I had something. My fingers hesitated over the screen.
What the hell was I thinking?
A day ago, I was ready to pay her to leave, and now I was hesitating on calling for help? On finding another place to stay to gather all the fucked-up things in my head?
Her head was fine, and her hands seemed to be healing, right?
I cursed and slid my phone back into my pocket then jerked the cabin door open and stomped the snow off my boots. “No signal.” The lie fell easily from my lips.
Keaton frowned at her own phone. “Me neither. Did it help going outside?”
“No.” Damn, lying always came way too easy for me, didn’t it? Maybe that was the problem. In all of my efforts to please my dad, I’d also inherited some of his worst qualities, manipulation and lying being two of them.
I was nothing like Noah.
I would have destroyed him with one hard Wall Street glance and looked down at him for not owning a suit.
Which just proved how wrong a man like me would be for Keaton, not that I was tempted.
At all.
She smiled up at me and grabbed the bottle of whiskey between her two wrapped hands. “You did promise me a shot if we finished a chapter.”
I found myself smiling at her giddiness, which I sensed wasn’t just because of the promise of alcohol, but the fact that she’d started their story.
“Why don’t I check on your hands first?” I offered.
“Ah, so he’s an author and a doctor now?” she said, looking even more ridiculous with her wrapped hands on her hips than she probably realized.
“He is.” I sighed and walked over to the leather couch. “Sit and I’ll unwrap the gauze and see how bad the damage is. Does it hurt?”
Keaton chewed her bottom lip and held out her hands. “Not really. Is that a bad sign or a good sign?”
“If I had Google I’d be able to tell you that.” I gently grasped her right hand. “But since I don’t, and because I never got my medical license but did something stupid like graduate with honors in business, I’m just going to have to guess.”
“What every patient wants to hear. Truly,” Keaton muttered under her breath, and an answering smile crept over my face again.
I quickly sobered when I got my first glimpse of the skin on her hands. Everything was still angry red, and she had small sores on her pinky as well as her thumb and forefinger.
“I can’t look.” She squeezed her eyes shut while I rewrapped her right hand. “Are both hands bad?”
I winced when I unwrapped her left hand. It had somehow taken the brunt of the damage. Every