The rain thickens. Thunder rolls in the distance. Lightning flashes, bleaching the cabin white for a heartbeat.
My body tenses automatically, bracing for a blow that isn’t coming.
Nothing happens.
Diesel doesn’t move. He keeps breathing evenly, steady as the rain. I press my hand over my heart and wait for it to slow. When it does, when my breathing starts matching the rhythm on the roof, I let my eyes close.
I drift without worrying someone will yank the covers off and drag me out of bed.
I hate that the one place I feel almost safe is a cabin belonging to a man I’m supposed to betray.
But I’m too tired to hate it for long.
Sleep pulls me under like a river, and for a few hours, I float.
Chapter 4
Diesel
Ispendhalfthenight in the garage, pretending to work.
Engines don’t argue. They don’t lie. They either run or they don’t.
I swap out a filter I don’t need to swap, just to keep my hands busy. I tighten bolts on my bike. I reorganize tools that are already in order. Anything that keeps me from going back inside and looking at the bed, at the blanket, at the woman sleeping there.
My eyes keep drifting to the corner of my workbench, where a photo sits under a magnetic strip.
Me and my mother. Years ago. Before.
She’s laughing in the picture, head thrown back, red hair bright even in faded print. But her eyes are sad. Like she already knows the ending.
She had the same red hair as Grace.
That thought comes sharp and unwelcome, like my brain is trying to tie knots I don’t want tied.
I promised my mother I would never let a woman suffer under a man’s fists the way she did.
She left before I could keep that promise for her.
Maybe this is my chance to keep it for someone else.
When dawn creeps into the edges of the trees, I wash the grease from my hands and go back inside.
Grace is still asleep.
Curled on her side, hair spilled across the pillow, mouth soft, one hand wrapped around her sketchbook like it’s a lifeline. The sight of her that way hits me in the gut. Not lust first. Something worse.
Tenderness.
And a hard, possessive need to keep her breathing like that.
I don’t move closer right away. I shouldn’t. I’m not a man who sneaks up on sleeping women.
But her sketchbook is half open, the corner of a page peeking out from under her fingers.
Curiosity tugs. Quiet. Insistent.
I lift the edge just enough to see.
