Chapter 8

Iwished that I'd just turned around when I'd gotten the voicemail telling me that he was in Nashville, gone to the apartment to pack my shit, and gotten the hell out of this one-horse town where anyone who'd ever seen me could give me away to Alex if he bothered to ask.

It would've been so easy; I could've just gotten rid of my phone and gotten another burner, traded in my car for a different one, and gone straight to Knoxville or anywhere else and gotten lost in a big city.

But no. No, instead, I'd been entranced by a pair of dark green eyes and broad shoulders of someone who was acutely sure of himself and of what to do when I'd had no idea.

That was the problem with a panic attack; it clouded all your rational thoughts and eliminated all possibilities of doing what was made the most sense. Instead, you wound up trusting the sexy guy with the cute dog who'd offered you a safe port in a storm.

I sat in the corner of the couch, wavering back and forth between cursing my desire to run far away and being thankful that I'd been out of the apartment when Alex had gotten there and decided to destroy it. Every time I stopped to think about what Dillon had described to me, I started to shake, and I had to go back into taking the slow, deep breaths that I'd always taught my clients to take whenever the world got too big for them.

"Look," I heard Dillon's voice saying as he came over to take a seat on the coffee table, "I don't mean to be a dick, and I don't mean to be controlling. But when you turned up on my doorstep and I realized that your situation was so much more serious than just needing a drive back to your car, I couldn't help feeling responsible for you."

"Why?" I said into my knees. "You don't know me. You don't know anything about me."

"I know that no one deserves to be treated the way he treated you. No matter what," he said, prompting me to look up at him. His green eyes were smoldering with anger. "I might not be a cop anymore, but the instincts are still there and they run deep to keep people safe. You need help and I'm going to help you until you don't anymore."

"But why?" I asked, feeling like I might actually go insane without an answer. "You don't actually owe me anything."

He met my stare evenly for long enough that I started to feel uncomfortable before getting up and heading into the kitchen. "What can I say? It felt a little like fate for you to show up here that day. And my uncle was always the type to tell me that if it was in my power to help someone and I didn't, I was failing. Wouldn't you help me if the roles were reversed?"

I kept looking at him as he puttered around the kitchen, biting down on my lip as I thought over the hints of his life that he'd dropped so far. He'd been a cop in Nashville, and Ally had told me about his uncle, who had owned this cabin. The more I thought about it, the more his life story seemed to unfold in front of me.

"Is he why you became a cop?" I asked quietly as I continued to look at him.

He shrugged one of his shoulders as he turned on the coffeepot. "Kinda. He bought this place before I was born, and then when I needed a place to live, he didn't hesitate to open up his home to me."

I wondered what had happened to his parents. I could practically hear his mind whirring as he waited for me to ask him about them, but everything about him told me that the way he'd lost them had been traumatic. If it hadn't specifically been the loss of his parents, it had been some other loss in his life that had affected him deeply, and I didn't want him to think that I was just invested in digging into his private pain.

I got up off the couch and went to the counter, where Dillon handed me a mug of coffee that he'd fixed exactly as I liked it. I accepted it and watched as he started pulling out the ingredients for lunch, which looked to be soup of some kind. I was excited about getting something warm and hearty to eat. I sat on one of the barstools and sipped my coffee as I waited for the food to be ready, thinking about the soups that my mom used to make and how badly I wanted to talk to her.

"Do you think that I can use your phone? I'd really like to call my mom and at least give her an update on what's going on out here. Let her know I'm safe."

He'd asked for my phone before he'd gone into town, making sure to take out the SIM card and destroying that before destroying the phone itself. By the end, it'd looked like he'd put it in the food processor. Honestly, I didn't hate the idea. I would've given anything that kept Alex from being able to call me, but the downside was that now my mom also had no way of contacting me.

Now, the knowledge that the only ways I had of getting in touch with my mom were in his hands made me feel a little bit cagey. I just hated the idea of being beholden to him for anything more than I already owed him; it was distressing.

He looked up at me, a little sadly. "That's not a great idea. We still don't know exactly how he's been able to find you. It might've been through her phone records."

I sighed, huffing heavily through my nose as I stared him down. He had a good point, but that didn't change the fact that I was disappointed by it. Or by his high-handedness.

I was quiet as he continued to move around the kitchen, chopping all of the onions and carrots for the base of the soup and pouring olive oil into a deep pot that he put on the stove. I watched him move with such confidence through the kitchen and processed how measured each of his actions were, putting together more clues about him as I went.

"Was your uncle the one who taught you how to cook?"

He snorted as he continued with his chopping. "Hell no. That man basically lived on canned beans and hot dogs. He'd have raised me on them too."

That was an interesting choice of words, and like any trained therapist, I honed in on it.

"So, someone else taught you how to cook?"

His eyes flicked up to me, fixing hard on my face for a second before looking back down at his preparation of the food. "Yeah. A friend."

Jesus. It was harder to get information out of this man than squeezing water out of a rock. "That must've been an interesting arrangement. Was it someone that you went to after school or something?"

He gave me a small nod and a smile and tossed the veggies into the pot. They made a satisfying sizzle as they hit the bottom of the pot, and he started moving the onions around so that they cooked evenly.

I decided to try a different track. "Why a police officer?"

His face snapped up to me at that, and his eyes hardened to chips of green glass in an expression that had probably petrified numerous suspects in the past. "Why an art therapist?"

"I asked first," I said, crossing my arms and feeling like I was finally getting somewhere with this frustrating, impossible, gorgeous man. That intimidating face did nothing to quell my need to know more; all it did was throw fuel on it.

He held my gaze in silence.

I sighed. "I became an art therapist because of an art therapist. When my mom left my dad, I was… well, I was a shithead. A nightmare kid. My mom tried taking me to three different therapists before one of them put a pad of paper in front of me, and I spent the rest of the session drawing." I laughed a little at the thought. "I never went back to that guy, but the next week, my mom took me to another woman, and things actually started to get better."

"But you went to art school, right?"

I had, and I'd told him so, but I'd already told him a lot, and the balance of power between us was starting to feel dangerously out of order. I leaned over so that I met his eyes fully, holding his stare with all of its intensity. "Answer my question first. Why a cop?"

He finally looked away from me, turning away from me and grabbing a canister of lentils from a cabinet above the coffeemaker.

Sometimes, all people needed to know was that people were interested, and that there was someone who cared. Since he and I were stuck together for the foreseeable future, it wouldn't do any good for me to shut him out and pretend that I wasn't curious about him.

"Is it because of your parents? Did something happen to them?"

I saw his hand freeze and spasm a little. Bingo.

"Were they the perps or the victims?"

The cabinet door slammed shut, and he brought his hand down on the counter with so much force that I almost jumped. I waited for him to start yelling at me to mind my own business, that I was a nosy bitch, anything… but he didn't say a word.

I knew the question had been a risky one, but I was trying anything I knew how to try to get him to open up to me. The tactic had failed miserably.

Suddenly, the whole day set in on me, and I was tired of beating my head against this wall along with the knowledge that Alex had broken into my apartment. The reality of my situation seemed to settle in on me, and I felt heavy as a lodestone. Without saying another word to him, I turned away from the counter and headed down the hallway to my room, shutting the door behind me.

I didn't say a word to him for the rest of the day. He came to get me when the soup was ready, and I silently filled a bowl and took it back to my room with me, refusing to acknowledge him beyond the bare minimum.

Despite my refusal to speak, though, my body was acutely aware of him and I silently scolded myself for the rest of the day.