It was a grinding shriek.
Did he just, she thought.
But she didn’t have time to consider if he had done something as wild as moving the entire dashboard. Her leg was free—throbbing and ominously sticky feeling—but free. Plus there was the small matter of being in his arms almost completely. He barely had to do a thing to scoop her out, and ohgod.
He didn’t stop at setting her on the ground.
He lifted her all the way up, so fast she couldn’t help gripping him. One hand digging into his shoulder, the other somehow flying up to get a fistful of his undershirt. Face immediately heating at the idea of touching him that way.
And she couldn’t even immediately let go once she realized, either. All she could focus on was how tall he was, and how high he had her. She glanced down at the ground that now seemed like a million miles beneath her, and practically experienced vertigo.
Thankfully, however, he didn’t seem to care.
He simply started back toward the cabin, as businesslike as if he’d hoisted up a sack of potatoes. All the way to his truck, with his face grim and set and his attention on his goal, until finally he got to it. He slid her into the passenger seat, so nice and easy and gentle that she only then realized the full extent of what had just happened. She had been lifted and held and carried by a gigantic beast of a man.
But somehow, she’d worried more about touching him than she had about him touching her. She’d thought of embarrassing herself, of seeming like a wet blanket, fawning all over him. Instead of what she would usually think of in this situation:
Someone hurting her.
A man hurting her.
Like Simon Harcourt, squeezing her upper arm so hard it left bruises when she’d said no to a second date. Or Phillip Wanamakerin high school, slapping the door back in her face. Or her father. Her father—not physically violent exactly, but enough to make her jump when he yelled at her to get her goddamned head out of the clouds.
Gone now, of course.
But things like that lingered.
She had no idea why they weren’t lingering around him. She only knew that this was the first time she’d thought of the wordthreatthroughout everything he’d just done—arguing with her, coming to her aid, getting her out of there and putting her in his truck. And to the point where she didn’t even feel the need to express concerns about going wherever he was about to take her.
For the first time in her life, she knew it would be somewhere safe.
CHAPTER FOUR
His first suggestion was the hospital. Though it wasn’t really a suggestion.
It was more just doing it, then fuming when she asked him not to. “I just can’t afford a trip right now,” she said, and oh, the look he gave her. She could practically see incredulous steam coming out of his ears.
“Since when do you have money worries, kid?” he asked. As if he knew her. As if somehow they were buddies. It even weirdly felt like it for a moment. She almost answered him the same way she would answer a well-invested friend.Well, I used every penny from my parents’ life insurance to buy the place after they died, and now the building seems to need every repair known to man while nobody wants to buy books, she imagined herself saying.
Then she remembered.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I just don’t want to pay a thousand dollars for nothing.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about nothing. That ankle is bruised and bleeding.”
“Honestly, it’s not so bad. I can put weight on it, it feels fine. Really, Mr. Jackson, you don’t have to worry. And considering the trouble I just put you through, I would really rather you didn’t.”
He made an irritated sound. “Okay, first of all, I told you. It’s Jack. Just call me Jack, please.Mr. Jacksonmakes me sound like a mean math teacher you hated in high school. And second of all—you didn’t cause me any trouble. Your carrolled.”
“Because I was going too fast down a dirt road.”
“Yeah, and why were you doing that?”
She saw him glance at her, one eyebrow raised.
But she managed to shrug in response. “I just wanted to get home.”
“Come on now. I scared the bejesus out of you, and we both know it.”
