“You didn’t eat much.”
She shook her head noncommittally. “I’m not very hungry, I guess.”
That much was true. The sorrow clogging her throat made eating virtually impossible, even if she could have mustered any kind of appetite. Right now, all she wanted was to spend more time with Laurel’s book, but not as long as Razor was watching her like a hawk.
It wasn’t that she wanted to deceive him so much as she was loyal first and foremost to her sister. If there was a message hidden inside the book, Willow wanted to understand it before she entrusted it with anyone else.
She made another attempt to dash away the wetness on her cheeks. “Is there soap and shampoo in the bathroom?”
He gave her a grim nod, still piercing her with those unsettling, penetrating golden eyes. He looked as though he wanted to say something more, but he only watched her in silence as she got up from the bed and padded barefoot into the bathroom.
CHAPTER 7
Razor stared after her, but he didn’t let go of the growl building in his chest until the door had closed behind her and the lock engaged with a soft click from the other side.
Fuck.
What had he gotten himself into?
The tears she tried to hide from him just now nearly killed him. He stood and started pacing again, not that it helped. He was edgy from the hours of idle time cooped up in the small motel room—most of it spent in torment listening to Willow grieve for her sister in between brief rounds of restless sleep on the bed. He’d never felt more useless, hearing her weep into her pillow and knowing he was to blame for not reaching her sister in time to save her.
If he’d been born with an ability for healing like some of the Breed, he would have done whatever he could to take away Willow’s pain. If he’d thought for a minute that he could offer her any kind of comfort, he might have tried. But she’d been alternating between suspicion and fear from the moment she first saw him.
Whether it was her general distrust of the Breed in general or him specifically, Razor wasn’t sure. Either way, they’d both be better off if he kept his distance.
He wanted to think that keeping his distance would also prevent him from caring more than he should about her wellbeing, about her future. But she was already under his skin. She just had no idea how deeply or for how long.
It felt like a lie that he hadn’t told her about his months-long surveillance of the cabin yet. Granted, he’d been tasked with watching Laurel as a favor to Theo, but it had been Willow who’d captivated him from the instant he saw her. He knew that now.
It had been Willow, not Laurel, who’d become Razor’s private obsession. Willow, with her luminous brown hair, her angel’s smile, and sinfully lush curves that had instantly erased all other women from his memory and his interest.
It had been Willow’s face he pictured when he woke up hard and seething with lust after dreaming she was in his arms, or beneath him in the soft, moonlit grass of the mountainside.
It had been Willow, not her twin sister, who had made him almost lethally envious of Theo to think his old friend had the privilege of calling her his.
Now, here he was with no more than a couple-hundred square feet and one flimsy bathroom door to separate them and he couldn’t wait for the first opportunity to get away from her.
For good, if he had anything to say about it.
He wasn’t cut out for bodyguarding when he’d been born and raised a killer. He was especially unsuited for the job when the body he was supposed to be guarding was as tempting as Willow’s.
Damn, how long had it been since he’d gotten laid?
He knew the answer, and it correlated closely with the amount of time he’d been watching the cabin on the mountainside.
The sound of the shower running on the other side of the bathroom door only added to his aggravation. An image of Willow standing naked and wet under the steamy spray leapt to vivid life in his mind’s eye. His blood pounded in response, sending licks of fire through his veins and straight to his cock. His gums ached with the throbbing of his fangs.
Razor groaned. It was going to be a long fucking wait until they were back on the road.
Scrubbing his palm over his tense jaw, he glanced at the book she’d left laying on the bed.
He’d flipped through it once while she’d slept, but hadn’t seen anything of value in the text or the childish notations scribbled here and there in the margins. He’d watched Willow page through the book a moment ago, and something in the way she’d hesitated on several of the pages—the way she had seemed to study them—had piqued his interest.
He found the page where her tears had splashed down and smudged some of the ink. Recent ink, given the way it had run under the wetness. Razor smoothed his fingertip over the underlined entry that was still damp and rippled from Willow’s tears.
He found more bird names that had been underlined more recently than any of the other notations in the book too. Seven of them in total. Seven random scientific bird names, each underlined with the same pen, by the same hand. Laurel Townsend’s hand.
Razor glanced up from the book, suspicion gnawing at him.
