It came back in flashes, then all at once.
The fancy ballroom.
The sex in the bathroom.
The familiar face.
Adrenaline.
Fear.
Then abject terror when I couldn’t protect Steph.
Finding her, damn near losing her to the cold, then a night by her side.
I wasn’t a stranger to exercise, to moving my body. But every damn muscle felt heavy and weak as I became aware of them again.
If I was feeling so shitty, Stephanie was going to be truly miserable when she woke up.
I reached for the hand on my chest, gently turning it palm up, glad to find the nasty scrapes had started to close up already.They still looked angry but she would probably be able to wash her hands and hold a utensil without pain.
I didn’t have those kinds of hopes for her feet.
I’d never seen blisters like that before, ones that took up damn near half of her soles, so full of fluid that I wasn’t sure how she could possibly put any weight on them. All I could hope for on that front was that a few hours off of them would allow her body to circulate the fluid back away from her feet.
Not wanting to wake her up, I turned to glance out the window, my brows furrowing at the nearly dark sky.
The fuck?
I reached toward the nightstand before remembering my damn phone was dead.
But it couldn’t be getting dark.
That would mean we’d slept, what, twelve hours?
Not impossible, but I wasn’t sure I slept that much in a week, let alone one night.
Maybe that was why itwaspossible, though. A lifetime of sleep debt had finally caught up with me on the one night where I not only didn’t need to get up, but didn’t want to. Not with Stephanie curled up beside me.
As for Steph, well, nearly dying was pretty fucking exhausting for someone who’d never experienced it before. And I was sure the mild hypothermia had wreaked havoc on her body. Every system needed a reboot to recover.
So, yeah, it was possible.
The longer I lay there, the more likely it seemed as my stomach twisted in hunger and my bladder felt like it was gonna fucking burst.
“No,” Steph grumbled as I tried to slide out from underneath her while my sluggish mind started to put things together.
Like how my phone had been dead for more than half a day after frantically calling half of the fucking Costa Family. How they were surely all trying to track me down now.
I had to get up, head out, grab a charging cord, and call them back.
“Gotta go to the bathroom,” I told her.
My lips curved up as she let out another grumble and slipped into my spot as I got off the bed.
When I passed back through the room, she was still trying to cling to sleep. There was no good reason not to let her, especially knowing she was going to be in all sorts of pain when she woke up.
I went to the kitchen, brewing a pot of coffee.
