Find Me Series (Book 3): Finding Hope

by Trish Marie Dawson

  With a hand on my hip, I glared at the side of his face till he turned to look at me. “And are you going to bother telling me what they were, so I know how much of this crap I still have to look for?”

  Muttering under his breath what I only assumed was a colorful insult, he pulled his canvas bag open, and exposed a few balls of rolled up socks, a package of new toothbrushes, an unopened bar of soap, a book, several USB cords and a large bag of unopened toffee-flavored peanuts.

  “Okay,” I said, as I poked through his loot.

  “If you’re looking for the clippers, they’re at the bottom by now, three pairs. Satisfied?” Before waiting for my answer, he rushed up the street in the direction we came from.

  “Where are you going?” I called after his back. The answer I got was the sharp crack of thunder just above us. It rolled through the atmosphere with such force that I felt the vibrations underneath my skin. Only three short breaths later, the rain began to fall. It came down from an invisible open faucet, dumping gallons over our heads in a matter of seconds. It took ten minutes to run back to the truck, the entire time with me cursing as my tote bag bounced against my hip. I half-expected to find Keel waiting for us, sitting inside the truck dry and warm, but he was nowhere to be seen. The streets, half-paved and half-dirt, steamed in protest as the rain tried to soak into them, and the longer we waited, the more certain I was that the rain was beginning to seep through my skin and into my bones.

  Drake grabbed at my tote and dumped both of our bags into the tool box and then we dashed toward the first finished house on the northern side of the complex. After flinging open the front door, we found the lower level modestly decorated, with several boxes in the corner of the living room, as if a family had just moved in.

  I slammed the door behind me and shook my shirt, trying to get some of the water off. Pelting pangs struck the exposed metal from the house next door where one wall had been left open, creating a sort of musical chorus to go with the thunderous booming in the sky.

  “I don’t have dry clothes with me,” I complained, watching a puddle grow in size around my soaked feet.

  With a tentative sniff, Drake walked through the first room, breathing in the air. “It’s dank, but I don’t smell anything rotten – do you?”

  I took my own deep breath with caution. “Nope. But let’s open a window to clean the place out a bit.”

  “We’ll be freezing if you do that,” he argued.

  “It’s beyond stale in here, Drake. We just need a little fresh air…”

  He shrugged. “Fine. If you want to die a horrible and lonely death from pneumonia, I won’t stop you.”

  My shoulders sagged. “Would you really let me die like that? Alone? I thought we were friends.” I stared at him with wide eyes and a trembling chin until he took a deep sigh and ducked his head from embarrassment.

  “Damn, Riley, relax. It was just a joke,” he said softly.

  After a brief pause, I swallowed the forced lump in my throat and giggled through a smile. “Easy mark,” I joked, as one of the nearby couch cushions came sailing across the room at me.

  “That’s not funny.” He squared his shoulders and pointed directly at my face and said it again. “Not. Funny.”

  But the twitch of his lower lip gave him away and he knew I saw. He covered his quick laugh with a snort, and then scowled at me as he began sifting through the boxes scattered around the house. Kicking off my wet shoes, I forced open a stubborn window and pushed the curtains out of the way. Neither of us cared much to go outside in the storm and look for Keel. But I wanted to keep an eye on his truck where it sat abandoned down the street. We had no way of knowing which side of the road he had searched already, but judging by the thick layer of undisturbed dust that covered the interior of the house with a blanket of grime, it didn’t seem he’d been inside our current refuge yet.

  “Gather up some of these boxes, will you? I just found a lighter,” Drake said. He dumped a collection of miscellaneous junk into the far corner and dragged the empty box to a dark hole in the wall. The fireplace had never been used, but the home owners had left a rattan basket beside it full of split logs.

  It took only ten minutes to get a fire going. The cardboard was gone in less than three, but the wood was so dry that it seemed to invite the flames in, offering up a series of pops and cracks that sounded like satisfied laughter. When Drake walked off, I set my wet boots in front of the fireplace screen and lifted my feet up one at a time till the warmth penetrated the cold dampness of my socks. While flexing my toes in front of the heat, I studied the three framed pictures that were on the dusty mantle. A couple, from the looks of it, had bought their first home. A wedding photo was flanked by two smaller ones, both taken in a tropical location, with the two in the picture all smiles. Since no bodies were in the house, they either got out or died in their car on the highway somewhere.

  “Shame,” I mumbled to myself. “They would’ve had beautiful kids.”

  From the kitchen came the sound of banging cupboards and Drake’s rough voice cursing the gods for the icy rain. And for being stuck in the middle of nowhere with myself and Keel as his companions. And also for going to Arizona. And for there not being a bar at the Ark. He cursed everything he could think of until he ran out of nouns.

  Eventually he shut up, and I continued roasting my heels in peace. Until Drake screamed. It was the sound a dying man might make when confronted with his worst fear.

  “Drake! What?! What is it?”

  His scream turned into a whooping sort of holler and I ran through the room so fast that my elbow took out an entire tower of framed pictures that had been stacked atop a cardboard box, where they’d been forever awaiting their newly designated places on the bare walls. As the glass shattered on the floor, a fleeting thought bolted through my brain that they would never be hung. Never enjoyed. The pictures were lost forever, dead and gone, just like the long-dead couple they belonged to.

  We collided into each other just inside the kitchen as I rounded the narrowly tiled breakfast island. My feet, having become tangled in Drake’s, slid out beneath me and down I went to the floor, landing on my ass with the exaggerated flair of a stage performer.

  There was no way to tell if the blood I tasted on the side of my tongue was from my face slamming into Drake’s rock-solid chest, or from the fall, and I swallowed it with a grimace, instantly reminded of the dozen or so times over the last year that I had tasted my own blood.

  “Shit, woman!” Drake laughed. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Me?!” With a hard slap against his thigh that stung my palm and went ignored by him, I stuttered from between his feet, not bothering to stand. “You’re…the one…that was screaming!”

  With a crooked smile, Drake lifted one of his hands, where he was carefully holding onto a generously sized bottle of whiskey. He set it down on the kitchen island and used a finger to push it clear away from the edge before offering me his hand. Apparently, he didn’t trust me to not knock it over.

  “Need help?”

  I swatted at his outstretched hand, and swallowed again, licking my lips to keep any sign of my bleeding tongue from showing. “I’ll help myself,” I snapped.

  Not bothering to step aside, Drake crossed his arms on his chest and watched as I struggled to stand, my socked feet sliding not once, but three times on the slick floor before I managed to raise up on my knees before him with a huff. Cursing, I pushed the loose hair from my face and straightened my shirt. With absolute horror on my end and more than a little amusement on Drake’s, we realized at the same time that my face hovered just an inch from his crotch.

  My knees wobbled, then betrayed me completely by parting and I slid back down on my butt, a strangled squawk escaping my lips. I could hear the blood rushing through my ears with each beat of my heart and Drake’s booming laugh filling up the mostly empty kitchen. Not waiting for my permission the second time, he reached down and gripped my upper arms, and lifted me
with zero effort to my feet. When I backed away from him and bumped into the steel refrigerator, he laughed even harder.

  Taking the whiskey bottle off the counter, he pointed it at me and said, “I think you need this more than me, Riley. You’re becoming a prude. Wound up so tight you’re going to snap. You should do something about all that…tension.” He winked once before retreating to the living room, where I heard him collapse onto one of the couches. The sound of him coughing out a string of curse words followed immediately after. While I struggled to regain some semblance of composure, I heard him whack at the sofa repeatedly, calling the dust a rather brutal collection of words I’d not heard since middle school, when the boys thought it was rather hilarious to cuss.

  When it quieted, I figured he was sipping on his prize, silently laughing at me. I waited another moment or two, using the backs of my hands to cool my cheeks before taking a deep breath and joining him in the living room where it seemed dramatically darker than it was just moments before, even with the fire roaring with life.

  “You’re impossible,” I said, when he smirked at the forced expression of calm on my face.

  Instead of hurling an insult back at me, he patted the cushion beside him. “Take a load off, Riley. Come drink. Might be the best thing to happen to you in, oh, I don’t know…forever?”

  “Very funny.” I took the spot as far away from him on the sofa as I could, tucking my feet under me, but Drake reached out and yanked on my legs, despite my squeals to stop, until he had me nearly sitting in his lap.

  When I glared up at him and pushed his arm away, he rolled his eyes to the side with a half-shrug and threw his head back, taking a deep swig from the bottle. He passed it over, which I took with more than a little hesitation since whiskey had never been my drink of choice. Suddenly self-conscious, I desperately wanted to wrap a blanket around myself and hide. It surprised me that I was suddenly curious about what Drake’s hands would feel like under my clothes, and the carnal curiosity bloomed from my gut a sickening case of guilt. Connor was the last man I’d felt against my body, and until quite recently, was the only man I’d wanted. Drake playfully nudged me, stirring me out of my thoughts and back to the present.

  “Relax. I’m not reaching clear across the couch to drink with you,” he said, flicking one of his nails off the side of the amber-colored bottle that I forgot I was holding.

  “Fine, whatever.” With a lazy shrug, I pushed my back into the cushion and tucked my feet beneath me again, not at all unaware that our bodies were touching from shoulders to thighs. And he was warm, dangerously so.

  First I sniffed the drink, then took a sip so small it barely wet my lips. I licked them, and tried again, letting in a mouthful of the whiskey. I coughed it down, using the back of my hand to cover my mouth in case I spewed alcohol into the air. The burn was intense but welcome, and when Drake reached over to take the bottle back, I quickly took another swig, claiming it as mine for the time being.

  “Well, there you go,” he laughed quietly. “Help yourself.”

  And help myself I did. Eventually, Drake took the whiskey from me and nursed it himself, and though his mouth was for the most part preoccupied, it seemed for the next hour or so, as we sipped and listened to the rain beat the outdoors into submission, that he never took his hazel eyes off me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Y ou’ve had plenty,” Drake laughed, pulling on my back pocket until I fell back onto the cushion beside him.

  “Not nearly enough,” I sighed, eager to find a second bottle of whiskey.

  How we managed to go through the first one in just under an hour, I didn’t know. My head was delightfully dizzy and my body more than satiated with the heat that came from within my stomach, but I had the compulsive desire to drink until I slipped past the dizziness and fell straight into a blissful oblivion. Drake seemed intent on keeping me beside him, however. Which was different. And more than a little interesting.

  His arm was comfortable, so much so that I leaned into it and rested my head back. My eyes instantly began to cross from the fire shadows that danced along the bead board paneling on the ceiling, so I closed them.

  “Are you sleeping?” Drake whispered in my ear.

  I shook my head. It wasn’t an unpleasant thought, sleep, but even with half a bottle of whiskey coursing through my system, rest was the last thing on my mind.

  “Then can I tell you something?”

  “Hmm?”

  He shifted against me, and I let my body fall into the curve of his side. My head was now on his shoulder, my right arm loosely draped over the left side of his stomach and hip. I liked the way we fit.

  With a soft sound that might have been him clearing his throat, he spoke again in a whisper. “I was going to get married. Everything was paid for. Even the honeymoon…” I opened my eyes as his voice trailed off, more than a little surprised at the turn the conversation had taken.

  When he didn’t keep talking, I spoke for him. “She died before you got married?”

  “No. Well, yeah.”

  “Huh?” My eyes had a hard time focusing, so I tilted my head downward and stared at the top of Drake’s denim-clad knee. His worn jeans were tight around his thighs and out of curiosity, I touched the material to see if it was as soft as it looked. His right hand dropped onto mine and pressed against my knuckles, where he absentmindedly stroked my skin with his thumb. The movements were slow and purposeful, like Drake was attempting to memorize each of the tiny lines on my hand. I didn’t pull my hand away.

  “We had broken up. But it wasn’t that long before all this…couple weeks, maybe.” He sighed deeply and arched his back into the cushions, causing my body to lean harder against him. One more movement like that, and I would flop right onto his lap. “She left me for someone else. An asshat that made four times what I did.”

  “What a bitch,” I mumbled.

  My words caught him off-guard and he laughed. “Yeah, I guess. But I didn’t stop loving her, not really.”

  “You still do?” I turned so I could look at him but his eyes were focused on the dark chandelier that hung over the center of the room like a skeleton.

  “I don’t know. I think I did…for a long time.” He looked down at me and all the pain, all the vulnerability that filled his soul was visible right there in his eyes. We blinked at each other a few times before his gaze traveled once more to the light fixture. The crystals dangling from it moved only a fraction from the cool breeze that came in from the open window across the room. “What about that Connor guy…do you still love him?”

  “Connor?” I stiffened beside him but he seemed not to notice.

  “Do you?”

  “Do I still love him…” I let the words roll around in my mouth and work their way up into my thoughts for processing. Of course I did. “Yes.”

  He nodded like he knew what my answer would be. “And you think he’s alive.”

  “I have to believe that.”

  He startled me with a loud groan as he covered his face with his free hand. “God, I miss it!” He almost moaned the words.

  “Miss what?”

  “Sex! Don’t you?”

  My surprised laugh was short and breathy. “It hasn’t been that long. Well, for me, at least. Besides, I’ve been a bit preoccupied with staying alive during the last few months. Sex has been sort of an after-thought.”

  The wind howled outside and the branch of a nearby tree cracked and fell over beside the house. I jumped, and in doing so realized my hand was no longer on Drake’s leg. He’d brought it up to his chest. It was a different feeling. The muscles there were just as taut and strong as his thigh, but they moved in time with his breathing and heartbeat.

  He was looking at me with a soft expression that tinted his hazel eyes with swirls of dusty blue. I couldn’t remember seeing that color before. “It’s been a lot longer than a few months for me,” he finally said, parting his lips just a fraction. There didn’t seem to be appropriate words to u
se, so I only offered up a tentative smile. “Don’t do that,” he warned. His voice had dipped so low it was barely audible. Not threatening at all, in fact it was the opposite. Alluring and seductive.

  “Okay.” My smile only got bigger. I couldn’t help it; my mouth had its own agenda.

  “Don’t,” he said again, almost pleading with me.

  And then, because I didn’t think he would do it first, I kissed him. Softly. Slowly. Deliberately. With only the slightest of parts between my lips. It was purely for the sensation. The pleasure of feeling someone else’s breath meeting mine. Perhaps I considered it an experiment to see if our mouths, when touching, ignited anything remotely close to passion. When Connor’s face swam up to the surface, I pushed it back down and tucked it away somewhere safe. And I opened up to Drake, reaching with my fingers into his hair, taking him deeper into the kiss, inviting him inside my mouth where I didn’t only feel him, I tasted him.

  When he pulled away from me, my breath caught in my throat. “Did you feel that?”

  The corner of his parted mouth turned up in a smile. “Are you kidding? All the molecules in my body just imploded then exploded. I felt everything,” he whispered.

  Drake was right. That kiss didn’t ignite just a spark between us…but an explosion indeed.

  * * *

  The dripping sound of water woke me, but it was the cold air that prevented any return to sleep. I was lying on my side facing the open window, where the curtains fluttered around wildly. The fire had become a pile of glowing embers, dying a slow and painless death. A deep chill was everywhere in the room and instinctively I tried to curl up in a ball to hide from it. But there was a heavy arm wrapped tightly around my torso and a muscular leg wedged between my thighs, keeping me securely in place. Despite the banging drum that played steadily inside my head, the previous hours before my nap were more than happy to replay through my memory.

  As I recalled the way Drake’s mouth moved down my neck hungrily and his hands worked their way up the inside of my shirt, tugging it off me as they moved with the determination of a skilled lover, I was more awake than I had been in a long time. So awake, in fact, that my laugh of disbelief echoed through the room.