Or bored enough, more likely. Not a book or a TV screen anywhere in sight. A glance at the old desk, and I wasn’t even convinced there was a pen and paper in here.Gotta fix that if she’s going to be staying here…
Crossing the room, I had half a mind to wake her for food — if I was right about how long she’d been locked up in here, she had to be starving. But as I came around to the bedside and got a better view of her sweet face, I couldn’t find the heart to disrupt her.
A lot had happened in the last two days, and the way she was going, she probably needed the rest just as much as the food.
When the thought crossed my mind, she rolled over, snuggling her face against the drool-stained pillow as if in agreement. My chest tightened at the sight of it. I shook my head as I muttered to myself. “Good. I always did like a woman who knows what she wants.”
As she adjusted, eyes drifted down from her face to her fingertips wrapped around the edge of the duvet. I wondered how her wound was doing.
Sparing another quick glance at her heavy lids to make sure she was asleep, I stepped to the edge of the bed. Freeing the blanket from her grip and easing her fingers open, I was careful to keep my dirty hands far from the actual wound. No signs of swelling or infection. It still probably hurt something nasty, though, even if she wasn’t complaining about it.
But those bruises… they’d come out of nowhere. Despite how hard Gabe had grabbed her, there wasn’t a single mark on her forearm for nearly 48 hours. And now, deep purple and blue marks covered her skin.
Delayed bruising. Worth keeping an eye on.
“Books, ibuprofen, and a mini fridge,” I muttered, adding to my mental list of things that Kiera would need if Dom kept up these nonsense rules about locking her up.
Standing at her bedside, the exhaustion of the day finally hit me. It was so tempting to peel the blanket the rest of the way back, to nestle up against her warm body and press my nose into that sweet red hair — to let my dirty hands stain all of her.
But I shook my head and dropped the blanket — no matter how much her body might like the comfort, I had a feeling her mind would have a hard time making sense of it all in the morning.
She already has enough to think about.
Instead, I tucked her back in, careful not to smear too much grease over the white duvet before I walked away to the dusty old arm chair across the room. It wasn’t going to be comfortable, but at least it meant I could be close when that hunger finally caught up with her.
I wanted to be close when she woke up — for her to know that as long as I was here, she wasn’t trapped. She’d spent far too long feeling that way already.
I eased down onto the chair with a light groan — it didn’t have those terrible plastic covers that Dom put in some of the other rooms, but maybe it could have benefitted from one — the chair had certainly seen better days.
Doesn’t matter.I sighed, pulling a spare throw blanket over my torso and ignoring the chill in my legs. As long as she was safe and comfortable, I’d be okay.
When I closed my eyes, visions of red hair and tangled sheets looped through my mind. Soon enough, the sound of her soft breaths lulled me to sleep.
20
KIERA
If I just laid still,I could almost convince myself I was still dreaming. Bright morning light danced over vaulted ceilings that could have belonged in a ballroom.
But the sound of a boot scuffing the floor was too real.
I jolted upright, still confused on where the fuck I was. But as my eyes darted from the empty desk to the huge window to the hulking biker on the arm chair, I remembered exactly where I was. I took a deep breath, trying to settle my racing heart.
Shit, it’s already morning?
I didn’t even know when I’d fallen asleep. Or when Leo had taken up her perch. Some time after the sun set.
But as she stood from the chair and stepped toward the bed, I pulled the blanket tighter around my chest — and thanked god I’d put on a t-shirt last night. “What are you doing here?”
The sight of her muscular frame moving toward me, towering over my bed, was enough to raise my hackles. My body knew that if she wanted something from me, there was nothing I could do to overpower her.
My mind flashed back to Gabe, the way he grabbed me. The bruises on my wrist burned at the memory. It was just one of the countless times a man had weaponized his stature against me.
But Leo wasn’t one of those men. She had been nothing but kind to me.
The question froze her in place. Her brows knit together in an expression somewhere between hurt or confusion — I couldn’t tell which.
But if she was upset, she didn’t voice it. Instead, she cleared her throat, rubbing a hand over the back of her ropey neck and putting her biceps on full display as she hovered in the dead space between the bed and the chair. “Sorry, if I scared you, darlin’. I just wanted to make sure someone was around when you woke up so we could get you fed.”
