hiding in his head. I don’t know what those secrets are, nor do I want to, but I hadn’t thought Cali could be right about someone using me, of all people, to get closer to her and her father. The thought makes me sick. I’ve been sick about this for the last week, and it’s not getting any easier or better. I’ve lived in this perfect, safe little bubble my whole life and someone just took a big giant pin and popped it. Now I just feel completely out of control and I want to question every person’s motives around me. Who else wants to hurt me?
But I can’t think like that. I must move forward. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway.
Shaking off the last five minutes of my life, I realize I don’t have an ironing board to go with this nice little iron, and I am definitely not going back out into that hall. Ducking down below the bed in search of an outlet to plug the iron into, I see one just out of arm’s reach. I squeeze under the bed, reaching blindly toward the outlet. Come on, you darn thing. With the plug scraping against the wall, it finally runs over the small opening, and I try to maneuver it in, but the wall starts shaking again. Give me a break! Nobody can do that this many times a day. Being this close to the wall, I can, unfortunately, hear the sound effects much clearer than I was able to before.
“No, me, do that thing, you know, that, right there,” she moans. “Yeah, oh God, yeah, yeah! I love you so much, babe.”
Giving up with the plug, I jerk backward, thwacking my head under the bed. Squealing in pain, I crawl out the rest of the way and fall backward onto my butt in defeat. Except my butt falls onto something hard and it’s not the floor. What now? I look up, finding Jags standing…well, beneath me sort of. What in the world is he doing here?
“That looks like it hurt,” he says. His hand loops around my elbow, and he pulls me up to my feet and off of his.
“You,” is all I can say to him. Somehow the two of us ended up here at this house at the exact same time for two very different reasons over the past week. And now, we’re evidently friends. Or so he thinks. And Cali thinks. And probably Tango too. Is this some kind of setup?
“Do you need your life saved again today? Any more psycho boyfriends I should be aware of? Are you hiding one down there under the bed?” he asks with a sweet smile that makes me feel even more embarrassed. I had never met Jags before the Landon incident. I hadn’t even heard Cali or Tango mention his name. I honestly don’t know where Jags suddenly appeared from. Yet, there he was, helping Tango eliminate Landon from my life when things got messy—messy as in Landon took me against my will out to a field where he was about to either torture me or…I don’t know what else he had in mind, but the thoughts are still haunting me. Who does that? When I heard Landon admit, while fighting with Tango and Jags, to using me for the money he was promised, I realized I was the dumb-butt who thought he was taking me out into the middle of a pretty field to propose. I was a little bit wrong. How did we go from cooking breakfast together and having a baking flour fight to Landon dragging me into a field three hours later? Regardless, I am thankful Tango, and I guess Jags, showed up when they did. Especially right now, since I have a brand new self-proclaimed hero in my life. Ugh.
“Thank you, but I seem to be managing fine on my own today,” I say, pulling myself out of his grip. “Plus, I thought you were leaving. You said you were headed to Boston, and this isn’t Boston,” I mutter.
“I did leave,” he says, taking a step back and folding his large, muscular arms over his very broad chest. Gosh, one of his biceps might be larger than the thickest part of my thigh. Beyond that, he towers over me by at least a foot, maybe even more. And just to top it off, his skin is covered with a collage