Every time I drifted, I woke up to find him still there. Sometimes he’d be reading something on his phone, sometimes staring out the window, but every time I checked, his fingers were wound through mine, thumb tracing absent circles on my skin like he was rewiring my nerves by touch alone.
Sometime after midnight, when the halls were finally quiet and my mind had stopped sprinting in circles, I whispered, “I was so afraid of losing my job that I almost lost you.”
Ransom didn’t miss a beat. “You won’t lose me now, Sheriff,” he said, voice ragged at the edges. “But fair warning—I’m going to be insufferable about this. The whole town’s going to know you’re mine.”
His possessiveness was more intoxicating than the drugs. I could feel my face heat up, ridiculous for a man my age, but I didn’t care.
I laced my fingers tighter in his, anchoring myself to the present. “I want everyone to know,” I said, and felt the truth of it burn through my whole body.
He smiled—small, genuine, private. The kind of smile you get to see only if you’re the luckiest bastard alive. Then he leaned in, pressed his lips to my forehead, careful of the stitches, and lingered there until I forgot all about the pain.
The rest of the night passed in the strange way time does when you’re halfway between hell and heaven. I dreamed of sunlight and open roads, of Ransom’s hands on the handlebars and my arms around his waist, of laughter echoing out across a place where nobody cared who loved who.
I woke up every couple hours, heart full, and found him always there, chin to his chest and breathing slow, refusing to leave even when the nurses tried to herd him out.
At some point, I realized I didn’t care what the world thought. That maybe I never had, not really. I just needed someone who made the fight worth it.
As dawn cracked over the horizon, flooding the room with pale blue, I watched Ransom sleep, his jaw slack and peaceful, for once not braced for impact. I thought about waking him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Instead, I whispered, “You’re safe, Ransom. I’m not letting go.”
He twitched, eyes half-open, and muttered, “You’d better not. I’m way too pretty for the witness protection program.”
I grinned, reached over, and tugged him by the hand, ignoring the sting in my ribs. He slid his palm over my chest, gentle, thumb rubbing circles on my sternum until my heart matched the pace.
“Get some rest, Sheriff,” he said, voice thick with love and sleep.
“Only if you stay,” I replied, and closed my eyes, letting the sound of his breathing lull me back under.
I’d spent my life following rules, locking every door against the things I wanted most. But here, in a shitty hospital bed with the man I loved asleep beside me, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years. Peace. And the promise of something better.
When I finally drifted off, my last thought was that whatever came next—scandal, gossip, even unemployment—it would be worth it. For him, I’d do it all over again. And next time, I wouldn’t waste a single second hiding.
Chapter Seventeen
~ Ransom ~
If there’s anything more surreal than watching the man you love come out in front of his ex-wife, it’s watching him try to check himself out of a hospital forty-eight hours later like he hasn’t been held together by tape and spite for a week.
I’m not built for caretaking, but the first thing they teach you when you’re the black sheep of your family is how to watch people without them noticing. So I watched Floyd the whole time, sitting in the world’s least ergonomic chair while he bullied the day nurse, snuck real coffee into his IV drip, and proved to every attendant on the ward that a “doctor’s release” is more suggestion than law.
By the time I helped him into his jeans—he refused to leave in a hospital gown, on account of “having been emasculated enough for one lifetime”—he looked less like a near-fatality and more like someone who’d lost a long, stupid fight with a rabid raccoon. Still handsome, but in a ruined, ex-cop sort of way. The shiner on his cheek had faded to a brown-yellow, and his left wrist was mummified in ace bandage. He moved like every rib was a raw nerve, but wouldn’t let me carry anything but the discharge paperwork.
“You sure you’re up for this?” I asked, offering my arm because that’s what people do in movies.
He just shot me a glare. “If you ever say the word ‘up’ again, I will personally break your kneecaps.”
“Fair enough,” I said, but didn’t move my arm.
He leaned into it anyway, pride be damned. The elevator dinged open, and together we shuffled past the nurse’s station, Floyd’s lips pressed in a tight line like he was about to be called in front of the firing squad. Instead, the younger nurse on shiftjust smiled and said, “You two take care of each other,” which made Floyd blush all the way to his hairline.
Out in the parking lot, the wind had that bite you only get this time of year, sharp enough to remind you you’re alive. Knox had parked my truck at the curb.
Floyd glared at the battered Ford like it had called his mother names. “Couldn’t have gotten anything with suspension?”
“If you’d rather, Knox offered to carry you home in a wheelbarrow,” I said. “You’d have to fight Harlow for it.”
He rolled his eyes. “Get in. I need to stop at the station before we go anywhere.”
