He shook his head, gaze intent. “They’re never going to stop looking for you, Gracie.” He nailed that coffin shut. “You laid on top of me to save me, even though you knew nothing they could have done would hurt me. For. The. Rest. Of. Your. Life.”
The urge to cry was so strong, it took everything in me to keep it together. “Okay. I promise not to take advantage. I’ll try and get something figured out as soon as I can,” I swore, trying to hold on to my sanity as thunder cracked overhead, sounding closer.
I had no choice. I was out of them. Again.
But—I swallowed hard—I was alive, and I’d agreed to this. That was my choice.
I wasn’t alone either.
I had this butthole. My new friend.
Life was never going to be the same again, and I just had to deal with it.
I wasn’t sure how any of this had happened. How he’d landed in my yard of all places. How exactly the cartel had found me after I’d been so, so careful. But all of this had occurred, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Nothing but figure out everything as it came.
And it just so happened my only ally was a member of the Trinity. A man who could crush part of an engine into dust effortlessly. Who had been shot in the shoulder and only gotten a hole in the hoodie he had on. A being who could run barefoot over rough terrain and pine needles for days without a single scratch or complaint.
It could have been a hell of a lot worse to have someone else feel like they owed me.
It definitely could have.
I didn’t want to live with him. I didn’t want to take advantage. I definitely didn’t want to owe anybody.
But there were a hell of a lot of things I’d had a lot of time to think about while I’d been freezing my ass off, thinking my life was over. There was so much I wanted. And all of it outweighed what I didn’t.
I could be reasonable.
He already knew too much.
It didn’t make sense to be stubborn in this situation.
So…
One step at a time. For now. Even if it was scary.
But that was fucking life, wasn’t it?
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
“Fuck,” Alexander cursed as his steps slowed, and he lifted his chin up toward the sky.
I’d been watching it for the last… however long we’d been going. It had been hours since we’d last stopped. The sun had stayed sleepy and hidden the whole day, the clouds being a bunch of dramatic pains in the asses that had only gotten darker and darker. Thunder had been crackling for hours nonstop, like it was following us.
He was probably thinking the same thing I was—the rain was coming, and it was coming soon.
Again.
Fortunately and unfortunately, we hadn’t found anything other than some game trails. We were nowhere near shit. I hadn’t seen a house or even some kind of hunting cabin, and I doubted he had either with how focused he’d been on keeping his run steady.
I’d swallowed more vomit and thick saliva than I’d want to admit.
“We need to take shelter,” he said, coming to a complete stop. His hands went to his hips and grazed my thighs for a second before he dropped them. An eye peeked at me from over his shoulder. “It smells like it might hail.”
The Defender raised his gaze again at the same time thunder and lightning shook the trees and lit up the sky directly over our heads.
I jumped, or more like I squeezed the shit out of him. One of us could handle getting struck by lightning, and that person wasn’t me. I wasn’t the only one who had the same thought when he glanced over his shoulder again.
I smiled at him. Weak. Tired but relieved enough that it almost made up for it.
He focused forward again and started to move, glancing up over and over again. Then his head swung from side to side, from tree to tree, like he was trying to find something. Not too long later, three more way-too-close rolls of thunder and streaks of lightning above our heads, he suddenly stopped under a big tree with wide, spanning branches. One hand brushed my calf, and I took that as my sign to jump down—or slide down more like it, wincing in fucking soreness as my legs wobbled.
Honestly, I had a newfound respect for cowboys. Alex was no damn horse, but I still had no idea how the hell those men and women could ride all day. They were my new heroes.
I swallowed hard, trying my best to ignore my headache and everything else wrong with me—which was fucking everything—as he gestured me to follow. Eventually we stopped at a decent-sized creek as the trees swayed and the faint tinkling of raindrops hitting the branches and the leaves warned us it had started again. I almost fell on my face as I kneeled. I wanted to massage my ass, but I didn’t want him to know it was bothering me. His shoulders might ache from holding me.
We both drank quietly, and I was beyond worrying about dysentery or whatever other fucked-up illness I could get from contaminated water. Pulling the bottle of pills he’d given me earlier out of my pocket, I shook two out, then swallowed them with a handful of water.
As I wiped at my mouth with my shoulder, a shiver raced from my shoulders down to my thighs.
A big hand gripped my elbow, and I looked up as Alexander helped me stand. “Come on before it starts pouring.”
He let go, but side by side we so, so slowly walked back in the direction we’d come, a few drops making it through the canopy and onto us.
“Under here,” he said, ducking beneath the same tree I was pretty sure we’d stopped at. It was a huge one.
At the base, he kneeled and rolled onto his butt, pushing back against the trunk before stretching his legs straight out in front of him.
Don’t mind if I do. This might as well be the Ritz. Taking the backpack off, I crawled after him under there, doing the same, but beside him, so close his arm pressed against mine. The ground was hard, but not as bad thanks to the bed of pine needles. I sighed just as more thunder and lightning struck even closer, heavy rain making the branches ring right before drops hit the ground around us. A few landed on my arms and legs, but he must have chosen a good tree because what fell on us was only a fraction of what was falling around.
“How are you feeling?” he asked out of the blue after a long while, his voice steady like the countless hours of running with a full-sized human hadn’t worn him down.
Here I was exhausted, and I hadn’t done shit. “I’m feeling much better,” I croaked, not just full of shit but bursting with it.
And I knew he knew that when he glanced over. “You know I can tell when you’re lying?”
I sniffled. “Yeah, I figured. Do you know where we are?” I changed the subject, a lump in my throat.
He leaned his head back against the trunk, his jaw a hard line in the darkness as he faced forward, out to the forest. “I have an idea, but my senses aren’t fully back yet. I can’t get my bearings like usual,” he said just loud enough for me to hear him. “I thought we would’ve come across a town or a house by now. They drove us farther out than I had thought, and we’re going slow.”
Slow? My brain didn’t think so. Neither did my nausea, but I appreciated his sacrifice.
The wind picked up even more, the sound of the rain getting harder with more drops sneaking their way through our natural canopy. Drawing my legs up closer to my body, I held back a groan at my exhausted hip flexors as I curled my arms around my knees and set my chin on top of them. Part of me wanted to sprawl out, but I was over being rained on if I could help it.