“Shh,” I laughed quietly and lifted my finger to his brow line. I traced over the scar on his right eyebrow and then followed the ridge of his nose down to his lips. He let them part as I traced their shape. I lowered my head to his chest again, looking up as I followed his jawline next, and then delicately down the side of his throat. My touch slowed even more as my fingers reached his chest, where I drew small swirls into the fabric of his shirt.
Things could’ve wound up so much worse...
“I wasn’t supposed to text you my location,” I said as my fingers idled over his heart. “I was meant to send it to my dad. It was this thing he taught Jane and me when we first got our phones. If we were ever in serious trouble, we would only have to text him our location and he would arrive with whatever help he could bring.” I huffed a laugh and continued tracing patterns onto his chest. “But, because of the alphabetical order of my contact list, I accidentally sent it to you instead.”
Dean was silent for a moment, processing before I looked up at him again. What I wasn’t expecting was the mischievous little smirk on his lips as he looked down at me through half-closed eyes.
I frowned in confusion. “What?”
“So, you have me under Daddy?”
“Wait, no, that’s not what I meant.” The blushing didn’t take long to cover my face. “Is that really what you got from all of that?”
“Yup,” he nodded smugly.
I pursed my lips to stop myself from smiling and lowered my head back to his chest. “You’re ridiculous,” I muttered, poking his rib.
He tilted my chin up with his knuckle and looked at me with eyes filled with a different kind of happiness before he kissed me sweetly. It was a kiss that made me smile against his lips, blush harder, and flood with a sudden head-spinning, heart-pumping giddiness.
It was a kiss filled with unspoken promises.
A cool breeze danced lightly across my room through the open window. It was a subtle taste of the cooler months ahead. I had never liked the colder seasons but for now, I buried that thought and every other concern deep in the back of my mind for another day.
Epilogue
Dean
Lily and I were mending.
It had been a week since she came home. Physically, she was healing fine. Mentally, her walls were halfway up. She hadn’t shut me out but hadn’t opened up to me either. It was hard not to notice the pain in her eyes when she thought no one noticed, but she carried herself through each day with her chin up and a smile on her face. Even if she struggled to sleep. But it had only been a week. She needed time, and I had no issue waiting.
She bought me a toothbrush for her apartment the other day. It was her first day out that didn’t involve a doctor’s appointment. She and Kira kept the outing short, only buying a couple of things, but she told me all about it afterward. How far she walked and what they bought, and then she handed me a toothbrush.
“I thought, considering you’ve been coming and going every second day, it’d be easier to have one here too instead of remembering to pack your other one,” she had said with a bashful shrug as we sat on the couch, wearing black leggings and a baggy shirt. Her legs were crossed as she hugged a couch pillow in her lap, waiting for my reaction with a little, hope-filled smile on her face.
I had half smiled and kissed her softly. A slight overreaction to a toothbrush but I couldn’t help myself, especially when she was looking that adorable.
That was the extent of our physicality though, and for good reason. Things were tender, literally and figuratively.
Lily rarely ever let me see her in anything less than a T-shirt. Only allowing me to see beneath it when she needed help with changing the dressing of her wounds, and that was usually just with the shirt half rolled up. When changing the dressing was finished, she would pull the shirt back down as fast as possible and flash me a smile to show she was okay.
Someone nudged the bottom of my boot, pulling me from my thoughts while I lay on a dolly, finishing a service on a Toyota Highlander.
I dropped my hands to my chest, making no attempt to move just yet as I peered down at my colleague’s feet. “What?”
“Someone’s asking for you outside,” Allen, one of the older, grumpier mechanics, grumbled back.
Gripping the underside of the car, I propelled myself out from beneath it and rolled to a stop to look up at Allen. “Did they tell you what they want?”
“Nope,” was all he said before he left.
My jaw tightened and I got to my feet. Snatching a rag from my workbench nearby, I eyed the street outside and wiped the grease from my hands.
There was a black car parked outside. I could see the end of it from where I was in the garage, but it wasn’t Antonio’s Mercedes. He wouldn’t show up at the garage anyway. A text with a random address was more his style.
That familiar sinking feeling started in my chest.
I started walking, keeping my head clear and face neutral as I stepped outside. I scanned the street for anything unusual and approached the brand-new Ford Mustang Mach-E with a fleet number on the back.
