13
Last night’s afterglowclung to Iris like morning dew. She was keyed-up about meeting Keith’s team, but even that nervousness wasn’t enough to dispel the lingering sweetness she felt.
Her happiness was as resilient as armor, at least for the moment. It was even, she had promised Keith, protecting her from any dread she might have felt about being this close to the barrier again.
“Have you been out of town since the accident?” Keith asked now, softly.
He must have seen her looking at the faint soap bubble sheen in the air that marked the boundary of their closed-off world.
Well, maybe even this armor had a chink in it. But she really did feel a thousand times better than she would have felt without him.
“No,” she admitted. “I was afraid that if I left, it would never let me back in again.”
And that she would be right back in the crash again, smelling smoke and hot, twisted metal ... tasting blood from where she’d bitten her tongue ... slowly coming alive to the razor-sharp pain ....
She shuddered a little and tucked herself against him. If they got a hundred years together, she still didn’t think she could ever get tired of the way he put his arm around her so quickly and easily, like she belonged at his side.
“And I think I was also a little afraid that if I left, I wouldn’twantto come back in again. Then I’d find out that no matter how hard I was trying, I hadn’t gotten all the way to being good after all. It’s like what you said before: I felt like I was hanging onto the rules by my fingernails, and I was terrified of slipping up.”
“You don’t feel like you’re slipping now, do you?”
How could she slip when she was with him? He would catch her. She knew it in her bones.
“No,” she said warmly. “I feel like I finally have my legs under me again and I’m choosing to take the steps I really want. With you.”
Keith kissed her ear, making her shiver.
Since they couldn’t actually have sex right out here in the open, especially when they were waiting for his friends to arrive, Iris did her best to keep that feather-light touch from rocketing her off into space.
She could make conversation. She wasn’t entirely sex-crazed.
Yet.
“Is it hard for you to be home?”
Keith considered it.
“Not when I’m with you,” he said. “But being with Lady Marianne, being with your family ... yeah, a little. It’s like I can see more clearly than ever that their world isn’t the one I want, but knowing they’re all watching me still puts me on edge. One of the big things Gretchen told me, way back then, that made me get my head together was that no one from back home was evaluating me anymore. The Marshals weren’t sending home a report card. I had a nice, long reprieve from worrying about what the Council would think of me, and now—”
“Now you’re back,” Iris said, nodding.
“Yep.”
