by Wendy Byrne
I soaked in the comfort of his body against mine, his arms circling my back protectively. And for those few seconds, I allowed my mind to stop working, allowed all my problems to momentarily dissipate into thin air because if I focused on all that lay ahead, I would dissolve into tears.
Shane’s skin still felt too warm which made me nervous. But, for now, I’d concentrate on how far we’d come and the sliver of momentary peace that went along with it.
That story about his mother, the deep affection I’d seen in his eyes when he talked about her, nearly tore my heart out. Because of circumstances and experiences, he’d learned to keep people at a distance. The fact that I’d seen him so vulnerable probably bothered him. Although, at this point, I had to believe a thread of hope had sprung to life inside him.
Despite our rocky start and stubbornness on both our parts sometimes getting in the way, I knew this thing between us was different than any other relationship I’d ever had. We hadn’t had sex yet, and nothing physical had transpired between us besides a minor kissing foray, but still I felt more intimate with him than I had with any other relationship.
To me, being able to share those moments of vulnerability, knowing that the other person had my back no matter what, was the truest test of intimacy. And while Shane tried to keep up the pretense that he was the badass to end all badasses, he’d revealed his vulnerability to me. Granted it came out in fits and starts, but it proved he trusted me as well.
My family accused me of falling in love too hard and too quickly, but that wasn’t true. I fell into lust at the drop of a hat. But that quickly disappeared when the guy in question either presented no challenge or turned out to be so obnoxious I couldn’t get beyond it to remember how attractive he’d been in the first place, or, worse yet, harbored terrible secrets. This thing between me and Shane was so different. So unexpected.
He slowly slid away from the hug; a crooked smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. “What about you? You made me tell you all my secrets, but you’ve given up none of your own.”
I shrugged. “You know most everything about my boring life.”
“I know about Max, but what about other boyfriends?”
“Oh, I get it. You want the real dirt.” I couldn’t help wondering about his motivation. Casual conversation or genuinely interested in what I might reveal? “There’ve been a lot of relationships in my life, but none of them serious.” Did I really want to get into the hurt and betrayal that made up my prior relationships? Now didn’t seem to be the right time.
“You’ve never had the urge to settle down and raise a brood of kids?”
“I’m the spontaneous sort, although my mom cautions I’m a wee bit selfish.” I gave him a flirtatious smile to lighten the mood. “Okay, she says I’m a lot selfish, but she says it delicately to make me feel good.”
He smiled and rubbed my hand before resting it on my leg. “Sometimes you’ve got to be selfish.”
“Maybe. Personally, I think she’s angling for more grandchildren. Luckily, Enrique and Sammie have taken the heat off me for a while.”
“What happens when we get this all straightened out? Do you have another gig lined up?”
I’d been asking myself the same exact thing. In some ways I didn’t want to leave, despite the fact this had been one hellacious experience so far, and I was pretty sure it would get worse before it got better. If I had any brains, I would take the next plane back to Florida and lay low until Enrique could come back to fix everything for me. But suddenly that idea didn’t seem very enticing.
“I’m not sure. Then again, I’m not used to planning my gigs.” I shrugged.
He turned to face me and smiled. His face inched closer. His bruises seemed to be lessening or maybe I had gotten used to them.
Right now, bruises, contusions, life and death were distant memories. The only thing I had on my mind was the fact he was going to kiss me.
And I couldn’t wait. The last time it had been my initiative. Now, this was all him.
Then, just like that, he did. His hands went on either side of my head while his lips came down upon mine. He slid me down against the mattress and leveraged himself over me.
Heaven.
The man was a born kisser. He took his time, like a man savoring a fine wine, enjoying each touch of lip to lip.
As he sucked on my lower lip, he scraped the edge with his teeth, sending a tingle clear through to my toes. My tongue probed his mouth while his hands slid up my sides to cover my breasts.
He moaned. I interpreted that as a good sign until he followed it with a string of expletives, Shane style.
“This isn’t going to work,” he ground out before pulling away from me and sitting up.
“Excuse me?” I rested my arms on my elbows.
“Nothing can happen between us,” A look of despair replaced his look of concentration. At least he had the decency to maintain eye contact with me when he spoke.
That didn’t feel like a great consolation prize right now. Someone had once said eyes were the window to the soul. I saw a whole lot of pain within the deep-blue depths of his.
I shrugged, trying to hide my frustration. Frankly, the guy didn’t look as if he could go a round of sweaty sex anyway. “I—”
He blew out a breath. “I’m not what you need. I don’t get involved. I don’t talk about my past. I’m not a touchy-feely kind of guy. I’m not into exploring my sensitive side. I’m all about the here and now and what I can get out of it.” He shrugged. “Believe me, Gabriella, you want to run as far and as fast away from me as you can.”
I clenched my jaw, barely resisting the urge to pop him on the side of the head. The man was making me crazy.
“That’s kind of hard to do, considering we’re trapped together until you, being the macho type, can figure this all out.”
“I feel bad about bringing you into my mess, and I won’t take advantage of the situation. A stand-up guy wouldn’t do that.”
“And you’re nothing if not a stand-up guy, huh?”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying it must be hard being so macho. So far, we have no baths, at least not alone; and now we have an additional caveat—no relationships.” I tsked. Had he not heard anything I’d said before? “Must be hard to function amidst the rules.”
“You can be a real pain sometimes, Gabriella.”
“And you, on the other hand, are Mr. Sunshine.”
“Yeah, I think it’s in one of the macho guy handbooks.” A smile twittered at the edges of his lips.
I wouldn’t fall for that aren’t-I-cute grin. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to fall for his attempt at making peace, no matter how charming. But, unlike some others, I wouldn’t let him get away with his line of BS. Somebody had to call him on his tendency to stick his head in the sand in order to avoid the inevitable.
“I know what this is all about. It’s because I asked you about your scar and you told me about your mother. Ooooh, too scary for the great and hopelessly stoic Shane O’Neil.” My pulse raced at about a million beats per minute. “We weren’t going to have sex. I know that. Geez, you’re coming off a bad concussion. There’s nothing for you to get all apologetic about. We were necking, that’s all. A bit of creature comfort should be expected after everything we’ve gone through.”
He ignored my comment. “Maybe I’m not attracted to you.” Folding his arms across his chest, he stood.
Ouch. That hurt. “Then maybe you should have a little talk with the lower half of your body. I don’t think your junk got the message.”
“Testosterone. A dog could rub against me, and I’d get aroused.”
“Excuse me. Did you just call me a dog?”
He exploded into a string of expletives. “You know what I mean.”
“No. Maybe you should spell it out for me because I appear to be missing something.”
“You’re beautiful, sexy, smart, clever, and all those good things. But I’m bad news. We�
��d have sex, and you’ll start to think the relationship is going somewhere, but it won’t because that isn’t where I want to be.”
This guy had issues on top of issues. “Oh, I get it. If we have sex, I’ll fall head over heels in love with you because you are such a stud, you will have spoiled me for any other man. That makes a whole heck of a lot of sense.”
“You’re convoluting everything I say.”
“No, I’m interpreting it from ‘Shane speak’ into real language. You don’t need or want a ‘girlfriend,’ and you’re afraid if we do the nasty that’s how I’ll interpret things. You think before long, I’ll be picking out china patterns and moving into your apartment.” I blew out a short quick breath to keep my temper from shooting through the roof. “That’s not where my head is. However, you don’t give me enough credit to even contemplate the idea I might think differently. You assume I want to snag you because you’re such a great catch.” My laugh was bitter. “Hello, Earth to Shane. You’re protecting yourself, not me.”
He shook his head. “I told you before, you don’t know me. You only think you do.”
“Keep on dreaming, hotshot.”
While his stare as well as the locked jaw let me know he wanted to say more about the subject, he didn’t. Instead, he moved the topic to a less provocative arena. “I need to get healthy so I can figure a way out of this.”
If he knew me better, he’d know he’d picked the entirely wrong thing to say. “And what am I, chopped liver? Face it. I’ve been calling the shots for a couple of days now, and things have turned out well so far.” And while I’d been anxious for this day to come, now that he wanted to totally take over, even the hint of it aggravated me.
Shane didn’t respond, but instead got out of bed and began to pace. “This isn’t how I planned for things to happen. You shouldn’t have to worry about protecting me. I never should have involved you in the first place.”
“I don’t think you made that choice. It was made for you.” Things had been put into motion that night when I saw Mack in the alley. I didn’t know how or why it connected with what happened to Shane, but somehow I knew it did.
“Let’s go to the airport and get you a ticket out of here. Get you back to your family in Florida. This isn’t your war to fight. The farther you get away from me, the better.”
I shook my head. “No way.” I stopped his frenetic pacing with a palm to his chest. If he kept that up, he’d go facedown any second now. “Don’t even think you can fool me. I know what this is about. You want to put distance between us not only to protect me, but to protect yourself as well.”
He placed his hands on his hips. “How so?”
“Big bad Shane O’Neil is scared. You’re scared of me. You were the other day in your apartment, and you are now. You know as soon as you’re feeling better, it will happen. And it won’t be just sexual intimacy between us; there’ll be emotional intimacy as well. And you can’t stand the idea you could ever willingly be that vulnerable. No doubt it bothers you to no end that I saved your life. Because of circumstances, you’ve had to rely on me.”
The thought came to me like a flash. He was avoiding intimacy with me because he realized at some level it scared him. He just didn’t know why. While I knew that before long there’d be miles and miles of geographical separation between us, I couldn’t avoid the issue.
“Because I told you a few things doesn’t mean you know me.”
Avoidance was the only way he knew how to deal with anything. Most of the time, I was an argue-to-the-death kind of gal. Today, maybe because he looked so pathetic covered in bruises, or maybe because it was an argument I didn’t necessarily want to win, I gave in. Talking about what lay between us wasn’t keeping either one of us alive. “Maybe we should concentrate on the case and leave our attraction out of the discussion for right now.”
“You threw it in. I was trying to make sure you were safe.”
“By sending me to my family? Do you think leaving you here to die will make me feel good?”
“I’m not going to die.” Shane snarled the words as if I were the person threatening his life.
“You may feel one hundred percent better, but you look like crap. I’m sure you’re spiking a fever since it’s hotter than hell in here, and you’re walking around with a sweatshirt on. You’re weak and vulnerable despite what you might want to think.”
“It’ll take me a couple of days to get back my strength, and then I’m putting you on a plane.”
“In a couple of days, this might all be academic. Let’s concentrate on what we can be doing now.”
He plopped down onto the bed. “We’re near the University, right? Plug my flash drive into a computer at the campus library and make copies of everything relative to the case so we can go over it to see if we’re missing something. Then pull up my alternate email account. See if anything was sent to me from Vince before the accident.”
“If the police are involved, don’t you think they would have hacked into your computer by now and deleted anything they didn’t want you to get your hands on?”
“I don’t save anything of significance on my hard drive or in the Cloud. It’s all on this flash drive. Everything that I want to keep on the down low, I’ve set up different email accounts for. I never access those from my office or home computer. Instead, I go to independent locations, like libraries, coffee shops, places they’d have a hard time tracking.”
“Brilliant.” I slipped on shoes and appropriated the Wisconsin Badgers baseball cap I’d purchased for Shane and shoved my ponytail through the gap in back. “I’m pretty sure I saw a sign for the University Memorial Library at the corner. Give me your secret email address and password, and I’ll see what I can find.”
He stopped me with an outstretched hand. “Wait a minute. I’m not so sure about this. What if they figured out where we’re at? They could be waiting for you.” He reached down to put on his tennis shoes. “I’m coming with.”
“No way. If my mission is to fly under the radar and blend in, being next to a six-foot- four-inch Barney wannabe, is not going to work.”
“I’ll put some makeup on the bruises.”
I put my hands on my hips, ready to fight him on this. Out of everything I’d done over the last couple of days, this had to be the easiest, even if I knew nothing about computers. “I never thought I’d see the day when Shane O’Neil would be asking for some cover-up cream,” I huffed. “Besides the fact there isn’t enough makeup in the world to help you right now, two of us will definitely attract more attention than one.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I’m right, and you know it, so get over yourself. The bad guys don’t even know where we’re at.”
He hung his head. “Remember, try not to attract attention.” He gave me a wry smile. “I never thought I’d see the day when Gabriella Santos shopped at Wal-Mart.” He laughed. “But at least you bought some jeans and tennis shoes. You actually might be able to blend in.”
I pointed my toe. “My first pair of Keds. It’s been an adjustment. Heck, I think there were even high heels on my baby shoes.” Distracted for a few minutes, I got back to business. “Tell me again how I work this thing?” Unable to imagine much information could be stored on such a small object, I held up the cylinder.
“See this metal prong in the middle. It hooks into the USB port on the computer.”
“Where is the USB port?”
“Laptops usually have it on the side or in back. Desktops have them in front. Usually.”
“That’s not helping.”
“You’ll figure it out. Just put Slot A into Slot B and then open it up. Retrieve the files from the drive and print out anything from Perry.”
“Sure,” I said with as much enthusiasm as possible, considering confidence in my computer ability was sorely lacking.
“Keep an eye out. They’re coming after us and won’t stop until we’re both dead.”
With that sobering thought, I walked o
ut the door into the haze-filled afternoon armed with a University of Wisconsin baseball cap and t-shirt as my disguise.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It didn’t take long for me to get to the library as our motel wasn’t more than a few blocks away. I found a parking spot in a small lot close by.
The library stood several stories tall, bordering the edge of the campus. Students milled about on the walkway outside as well as the steps leading up to the building.
Even though I was at least ten years older than most of the people around me, and had no idea what I was doing, no one seemed to notice. The students passing by looked preoccupied with either schoolwork or socializing with friends and ignored me.
I walked inside the cavernous place and adjusted the backpack I’d slung over my shoulder. Students milled around doing research or working in study groups at tables set up along the perimeter.
I meandered past rows of computers and observed, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. Students sat at computers searching the internet, checking their email, typing a paper, or in some cases, playing solitaire, only because the library probably blocked the porn sites.
Technology made me anxious. I could sing before a thousand people and not break a sweat, but stick me in front of a computer, and my confidence did a quick crash and burn.
My five-year-old niece Santana could probably do this. I should be able to negotiate my way through the simple steps of pulling files from the thing hooked onto Shane’s key chain.
But after ten minutes, all I’d managed to do was turn on the computer. I couldn’t find the elusive slot in which to insert the silver thing. Maybe it didn’t have one of those ports Shane talked about.
“Can you help me?” I asked the young man sitting next to me.
He put a pencil to hold the spot in his book. “Sure. What do you need?”