Cam rose and put more food on my plate. “Get that down you, then get some sleep.”
I did not take orders from him—from anyone—but it did not feel like one. Even as I ate what he’d given me, left the room, and sensed him follow me out.
He seemed bigger than when I’d last seen him. Muscles more cut, face harder. Or maybe I was comparing him to Ranger, the object of my every thought. Regardless, Cam O’Brian was a presence who might’ve intimidated me if I had been born a different man.
As it was, it proved difficult to be intimidated by someone who directed me to a bedroom on the third floor of the house and donated another bag of clean clothes for no reason other than his unflinching kindness.
“Couple of Ranger’s bits in there. I pinched some of Embry’s for you, but make sure you’re wearing your own stuff when we go and burn the rest.”
I peered in the bag, spotting a shirt of Ranger’s folded at the top. “I thought he had brought everything he owned with him.”
Cam had stopped in the doorway to the small room. He watched me struggle not to bring the shirt to my face andsniffit with a neutral expression. “If he wasn’t so gobby, he’d be just like Saint.”
“Just like Saint?” I set the bag down, still holding the shirt. “You do not believe a man’s words define him, surely?”
“I didn’t mean in every sense.”
“What did you mean?”
Cam regarded me with eyes two shades lighter than Ranger’s. Dark to anyone who hadn’t met the gaze of Asher Moore. “Just that he doesn’t need or want much. It’s why nomad life suited him for a while.”
“It does not suit him now?”
Cam glanced behind him, then back at me. “Nothing suited him while you were gone. Looking back, it’s fucking obvious he was as messed up as Nash and Orla when Locke got took.”
Nash. Orla. Locke. In different circumstances, I might have smiled, remembering how often Locke had denied being in love with Cam’s vice president and his sister. But my brain grew too heavy to bother. “Why are you telling me this?”
“In case you don’t know.”
“I know Ranger loves me. I can only hope he knows I love him too.”
Empathy flared in Cam’s gaze. “Tell him. More than once, before this shit gets going. It hurts worse if you don’t.”
I did not believe this was the conversation Cam had come upstairs to have, but it was the one fate gave us, and I preferred it to the alternative. The one where Cam reminded me of the last time we’d spoken. When I had been trapped on a bunk that smelled of Ranger, all the while believing I would never see him again.Choosingto believe that, as if I had not known that my heart could not live without him.
Jake knew.
And now Cam did too.
He left me alone. I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. It was the early hours of the morning. We would strike tonight and there was so much to do before then. So many thingsto pack into my head, but it felt full already. In this moment, I did not know how this had been my life for so many years. How it would be again. I did not know anything, except that a bed without Ranger was a desolate place to be.
And, that I was tired enough to lose the fight against my heavy eyelids.
I drifted for a while, fighting it. Then the bed dipped and smoky arms wrapped around me from behind.
Ranger.
“Shh.” He kissed my neck. “Sleep.”
I did.
Hard.
And sometime later, I woke alone, leading me to wonder if I’d dreamed him. If I was still dreaming as I took in the unfamiliar room. I was out of practice at being anywhere that wasn’t my home. Soft, perhaps. And I could not be. Not until this was done, or none of us would survive it.
Fear eroded any lingering wisps of fatigue. The room had an en-suite bathroom. I used the shower and dressed in borrowed clothes. Then I descended the stairs to find Jake still at the table.
“You need to rest, brother.”
