Cold

by Max Monroe

  But that surprise only lasted seconds.

  Quickly, and without hesitation, she hid that surprise behind a mask of irritation.

  “Got a minute to chat?” I asked, and she offered a small shrug of her petite shoulders.

  “I guess so,” she muttered and opened the door to her trailer wide enough to allow me to step in.

  She shut the door behind us, and instead of meeting my gaze again, she walked over to the small vanity mirror and busied herself with a wet washcloth, scrubbing it harshly against the skin of her cheeks.

  I didn’t say anything to her at first, just watched as she removed the layers of makeup and fake blood from her skin.

  “Is there something in particular you want to talk to me about? Or am I supposed to guess?” she questioned, transparent bubbles of anger forming from her words and popping right in front of my eyes.

  She was pissed at me. I had no idea why. But Ivy’s emotions were not easily hidden on her beautiful face. Her pain, her rage, it was evident in the crease of her lovely brow and the down-curve of her full lips.

  But her eyes, they showed her soul, and when they locked with mine in the reflection in the mirror, I knew all the beauty of the universe could not even hope to compete with the passion and fire and incandescence those emerald orbs held.

  And it was all of that passion and fire that put up the strongest fight.

  “Did I miss something?” I questioned, and her gaze widened.

  “Miss something?”

  “Yeah,” I responded, and I couldn’t stop the grim chuckle that escaped my lips. “Did I miss something between last night and now?”

  She set the washcloth down on the vanity, her skin now clear of makeup and reddened from her ministrations, and turned to meet my steady gaze.

  “Obviously, you have a point to make here, but you’ll have to stop talking in fucking riddles for me to understand what you’re trying to get at.”

  Her words struck a nerve.

  Hell, they lit a match to that nerve and burst the damn thing into flames.

  “Fine,” I said harshly. “Instead of nicely broaching this subject, I’ll play it your way. Why are you acting like such a cold-hearted bitch to me?

  “Excuse me?” she questioned, outrage spilling past her lips in a rush.

  “You heard me. Why are you acting like a cold-hearted bitch?” I repeated my words. “Because, last night, when you were clawing your fingers up my back and coming hard around my cock, you seemed to enjoy my presence. But today, well, that appears to be a different story. So, please, fucking enlighten me, sweetheart. Why the sudden change?”

  “You have a lot of fucking nerve!” she exclaimed, pointing a shaking index finger directly at my face and moving toward me. But her steps faltered when she closed the distance between us.

  “I have a lot of nerve?” I asked on a bitter laugh. “Pretty sure I wasn’t the one begging to put my cock inside you last night. That was all you, sweetheart.”

  “Yeah,” she retorted. “But I’m pretty sure you didn’t mind sticking your dick inside me. Hell, you didn’t mind so much that you didn’t even think twice about not using a condom and coming inside of me bare.”

  Fuck. My eyes widened. Had I really not used a condom last night?

  It only took a few seconds of searching my memories to realize her words were one hundred percent truth.

  I’d lost myself in her so much that I hadn’t even thought about protection.

  Hell, if anything, I subconsciously didn’t want to use protection.

  If it had been anyone else, it would’ve been my first thought.

  But not with her. Not with Ivy.

  With her, I turned into a fucking caveman who felt desperate about marking her. Claiming her. Making her mine.

  “God, Ivy, I’m so sorry,” I finally responded and meant every word.

  “Do you fuck a lot without protection?” She put a defiant hand to her hip. “Because that’d be a good thing for me know.”

  “Fuck without protection?” I repeated her words. “First of all, sweetheart, you and I both know we didn’t fuck last night. It was a hell of a lot more than that, even if you refuse to admit it to yourself. And secondly, no. I always use protection. But for some reason, when it comes to you, I do the complete fucking opposite of what I normally do.”

  “The complete fucking opposite of what you normally do?” she spat. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I retorted. “You make me fucking crazy. You make me lose all sense of rational thought. Whether we’re fighting or kissing or my cock is so deep inside you I don’t know where I end or you begin, I lose my fucking mind when I’m with you.”

  The fight in her eyes left at my words, and I reached out and pressed my hand to the soft skin of her cheek. “I didn’t fuck you last night, Ivy,” I whispered.

  A soft and shaky gasp left her lips, and she shut her eyes tightly. But it was too late, a small little tear slipped past her lids and started to make its descent down her cheek.

  I caught it with my thumb, and for the briefest moment, her face curled up with emotion at the feel of my touch.

  But then, like a damn wildfire had exploded inside of her veins, she abruptly pulled herself away from me. With both hands, she shoved into my chest in a weak attempt to put even more distance between us.

  “This is too much!” she exclaimed, and her tear-stained gaze locked with mine. “Stop doing this to me!” she shouted, her voice growing more strained and pained with each word. “After everything that’s happened, I don’t think I can trust you, Levi. And I sure as hell don’t want to feel this much for you.”

  Between Ivy’s sudden frigidness toward me this morning, her anger and emotion now, and the fact that I’d just watched her act out the scene, I felt like I’d aged ten years.

  A thousand pounds of stress and guilt and sadness and anxiety sat on top of my shoulders. Too many memories had bubbled up at the surface while watching Ivy portray Grace’s death, how it all had really gone down, and for the first time since it had happened, I just didn’t want to hold them inside anymore.

  I didn’t care about hiding them from everyone else, but I couldn’t hide them from her anymore. I wanted her to know everything.

  “You feel too much?” I questioned, and a million emotions flooded my veins. “How do you think I feel?” I said, and my words might as well have been a fucking lash, leaving my lips and snapping back with a bite.

  I moved one step toward her, but she took two back.

  “Do you understand how hard this has been for me, Ivy?” I continued, even though she was trying her damnedest to put space between us. She needed to hear these words, my words, my goddamn truth. “You are playing the part of the woman I loved! The woman I thought I would marry! The woman I lost!”

  She gasped and put a shocked hand to her lips, but that didn’t stop me, didn’t stop the rush of words that flowed from my lips like water from a broken faucet.

  “Grace was obsessed with finding the Cold-Hearted Killer. She was desperate to find Bethany, and that very desperation made her reckless.”

  I could see Grace’s face in my mind the night I’d caught her in the station after hours looking through files. The dark circles under her eyes had turned into real bruises, and her skin had looked nearly translucent.

  “So fucking reckless that I had to tell the chief to take her off the case. She was too goddamn connected, taking too many risks, putting herself out there every chance she got. She wasn’t being safe or smart, and I loved her. I couldn’t bear the thought of something happening to her. Which is really fucking ironic.”

  A harsh laugh escaped my lungs, and I paused with a grimace as a visual of Grace dead in my arms flickered behind my eyes.

  Ivy stayed quiet, her lips still parted in shock, so I kept going.

  “You can imagine that my role in taking her off the case didn’t go well—that she didn’t handle it well. She damn near had a
mental breakdown, to be honest. And because of that, she ended up in Dr. Walter Gaskins’s office.”

  Eyes wide, another gasp left her lips, but I couldn’t stop now. I had to lay it all out.

  “I was with her when he evaluated her. There to comfort her. Support her. Thought I was doing her a fucking favor since I’d been the one to push her to the brink.”

  I laughed, all bitter, no humor.

  “She let me. We’d been fighting like cats and dogs up until that day, but finally, there in the office, she let go of it all and used me for comfort.” I shrugged, my voice quiet. “It was obvious…that the two of us loved one another. And for Walter, that meant she went from a police officer he was treating for extreme anxiety and depression to his next victim.”

  I ran a hand through my hair and took a deep breath, preparing to unleash the final blow of Grace’s and my truth.

  “Walter Gaskins killed because he hated the idea of new love. In some weird, fucked-up way, I honestly think he thought he was doing the girls he killed a favor. Like saving them from feeling what he had to feel when his wife Betty died was a good thing,” I said, my voice dropping to a near whisper. The truth was becoming more painful with each word. But I stayed strong. For Ivy. I pushed past the discomfort and told her the rest.

  “After that moment in the office, he came up with a plan for Grace. Lured her to his house with a bogus disturbance call to her direct number. As if he was a trusted, frightened citizen of the town who needed help. She had a big heart and a soft spot. She called to tell me she was going, but she didn’t wait for me to get there before going inside,” I whispered.

  “She wasn’t a police officer who died in the line of fire,” I admitted aloud for the first time ever. “She was a victim. Just like the rest.”

  I rubbed at the ache in my chest, and the pressure made my voice turn hoarse. “Because of me. Because she loved me. If we hadn’t been in a relationship, she never would’ve been on Gaskins’s radar. She would still be alive.”

  Ivy’s mouth moved, open and closed as she tried to find words, but I didn’t wait for them to form. I had to finish. I needed to be done.

  “Besides Chief Pulse and me, no one else knows the real story. We swept all the painful details under the rug out of respect for Grace and her family.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Her voice was quiet as a mouse, timid and careful and shaking. I locked my eyes with hers so hard that I gave her no room to break the connection.

  “Because I had to tell you. I wanted to tell you. I fucking needed to tell you. Don’t you see it, Ivy? You’ve stolen my fucking heart,” I said, and that very heart responded by pounding hard and relentlessly against my ribs. “A heart that wasn’t even supposed to beat anymore. One that didn’t want to feel any-fucking-thing.” My voice dropped lower, deeper, as each word that left my lips held every emotion rushing through my mind, my body, my fucking soul.

  “But you’ve wrecked me,” I said and inhaled a long breath as I found the strength to lay it all out there. “There is no going back for me, Ivy. Last night, at my house, that wasn’t sex or fucking. That was me making love to you.”

  He was quiet, waiting for me to respond, and the skin of his hands was mottled white with the pressure from the clench of his fists.

  He’d been bottled, corked, and sealed from any and all emotion for so long, and now that he’d released the stopper, he was dangerously close to exploding.

  I searched my manic mind, trying to settle on one single thought or feeling, but the effort was torture. All of it was at odds, too mashed up, and anytime I thought I might be latching on to how to feel, something else would come out of the back and smash it with a goddamn hammer.

  And God, his vulnerability, it was there, so deeply evident within every facet of his expression, but it made me feel too many things. Hurt. Pain. Discomfort. Relief.

  Finally, he was opening up to me.

  Finally, he was letting me inside.

  But I couldn’t stop myself from being angry over the fact that he had been lying to me about so many things all along. It was like I’d been playing some sort of game with him, but only he had known the actual rules.

  My heart raced and my thoughts turned to scattered chaos.

  What were we even doing here? How was I supposed to make sense of anything that had ever happened between us? Even our softest moments, moments of commonality found in the desire to keep the movie true to the story, were shot to shit. The events were heartbreaking—mutilating—but they only made the disarray between us more of a mess.

  “Everything,” I whispered, the magnitude of the word making my voice shake. “Every painfully extracted thing between us has been a lie.”

  “Ivy, you know that’s not true—”

  My head shook, permission from my brain coming without premeditation as his words made me even angrier. “Stop. Don’t fucking insult me. All I’ve known between us is anger and lust and a fucked-up mix of the two while you’ve been stewing on the answers the whole time. All you had to do was tell me. All you had to do was—”

  “I’m doing it now,” he interrupted, cutting into my ramble and the air with the same sharp blade. His voice was crisp and unyielding, as though I was supposed to just fall willingly at his feet.

  “It’s a little fucking late.”

  His mouth turned firm, and the line of his jaw straightened with impossible pressure. I couldn’t understand how a person could grimace so hard without shattering their teeth, but Levi managed it. He managed that look all the fucking time.

  “I didn’t trust you,” he pushed, taking two giant steps forward. My hands shook as I jumped back to avoid his advance and bumped into the small dressing table at the side of the room.

  I laughed, a caustic, droning sound, as I swallowed the thick bile of irony. “Yeah, well, now I don’t trust you.”

  All of the rigidity left his body like it’d been let out through a previously locked door. The tension in his face softened, his eyes lost the harsh glitter they so often carried, and just one gently curled hand smoothed softly down the line of my jaw.

  It was intimate—startling.

  It was all the physical touch I needed to remind me of our night together.

  “I know you don’t. But I do. God, Ivy, I trust you more than I’ve ever trusted anyone. More than—”

  Stubborn tears pooled at the corners of my eyes before spilling over the dam and paving tracks down my cheeks. I shook my head, fighting the touch of his hand and the soothing affection in his voice. I didn’t want to be affected. I didn’t want to give him any of myself. I didn’t want his soft words or honest confessions, and most of all, I didn’t want the hope that there was a real possibility Levi and I could be together, that we could be something.

  Good God, I didn’t want to fucking hope.

  “Stop,” I ordered, the word catching on what would have been a sob if I’d let it. Instead, I choked it, guarding it with steel and whatever remnants were left of my battered heart.

  I wouldn’t be swallowed up by Levi Fox. Not now, not one day, not fucking ever.

  Right?

  His words were whispers, but what they lacked in volume, they made up for in everything else. They were honest and considerate, and they were wholly flattering. “I know you don’t trust me. And I don’t expect you to. But you’re everything I never knew I wanted and then some. You’re the perfect mix of backbone and nurture and just stubborn enough to put up with me. You’ve got a brilliant mind and a load of talent, but you still care about what matters. You use your head when you want to use your heart, and fuck, Ivy…you did everything you could to look out for a man who sure as fuck didn’t look out for you.”

  My cheeks pinked and my stomach flipped, unable to resist the warming glow of compliments as powerful as the ones he’d just given. He, Levi Fox—the most callous, broody guy I’d ever met—was waxing poetic…about me.

  “You don’t have to trust me yet because I’ll wait. I’
ll wait for you to understand how much I trust you, and I’ll wait for you to feel like I’ve earned yours. Ivy, I promise…I’ll wait.”

  With one soft sweep of my jaw and a kiss to the apple of my cheek, Levi turned and left me.

  Left me to his words and my thoughts and the swirl of everything he’d told me about his and Grace’s truth.

  Left me to decide.

  Levi’s clothes effectively removed from my dresser, I slammed the drawer shut.

  I’d meant to launder and return them quickly after changing out of them at his house the night after the hospital.

  But the twisted part of me had packed them up in my bag and taken them to our new rental property. The place was way less exciting than Grace’s old house, with white walls and store-bought furniture. The styling was modern rather than quaint farm, and I missed the comfort her house provided when I was feeling too raw.

  I knew staying there should have had the opposite effect, but her walls were friendly. She was welcoming in a way I hadn’t expected when I’d first accepted the role, and her little house always seemed to be good for advice on how to handle things I was otherwise wholly unfamiliar with.

  I wasn’t Montana born and raised, and I didn’t have the experience with small-town residents. But around every corner, there was a clue. Whether it was her grandfather reaching out to share some wisdom or a thoughtfully placed snow scraper on the front porch, Grace had prepared me for all the things I hadn’t thought about facing.

  But now, I was on my own, forced to come to some hard decisions without her guidance.

  Given Levi’s revelations about the nature of their relationship, and my very complicated feelings for him, maybe the departure of her spiritual guidance was for the best.

  “Hey, Ivy Belle,” Camilla muttered, just her head poking through the small gap she’d created between the door and the frame. “Is it safe for me to come in?”

  My brow furrowed, and my attitude peaked. “Why the hell wouldn’t it be safe?”

  Her smile was indulgent. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because you’ve been slamming shit around in here for the last five minutes loudly enough that I could hear you from down the hall.”