The refueling stop and break for the crew didn’t take long, nor did the flight to our next destination. While our luggage was loaded into a sleek sedan, a man handed Shawn a set of keys and a clipboard to sign for them.
The airport itself was too far away for me to figure out where we’d landed, although it obviously was too small to be one of the larger ones like Chicago or Charlotte.
“Okay, I give up,” I said. “Please tell me where we are.”
“I have a place outside of Tomahawk. I thought before we go back, we could visit the Madison plant.”
“Wisconsin?”
He nodded, but he had no idea that what he’d said had just set a ticking clock in my head.Before we go back. I didn’t want to think about that or my feelings about returning to Europe. We’d just arrived.
The hour-long drive was pleasant, and we chatted about easy things. Books, movies, our siblings becoming parents. The sun hung low, painting oranges and yellows across the sky when it broke through treetops. But as the forest closed around the road and houses faded from view, the time change began to catch up with me.
“When Ethan made me pass out, did you hit him?” I asked it quietly.
“I almost did.” His face was dark and serious. “That was difficult to watch.”
“Yeah.” Why had I brought it up? “I was surprised to see you there. I mean, I was so happy to see you. But surprised.”
“I’d been told to stay in the car, but then I saw Ethan carrying you.”
And he had to get to me, because he always got what he wanted, didn’t he?
If the roles had been reversed, would I have done the same? Left the safety of the car while a gun battle raged, to see him again? I studied him, his long fingers curled around the steering wheel, his tousled, chocolate-colored hair.
Yes. Oh, definitely yes.
We shopped for several days’ worth of groceries at a supermarket, and I found this activity oddly intimate. The only other man I’d done that with was Paul. And I was glad he’d wanted us to do it together, rather than have someone stock the kitchen for us. For a man with an excess of money, for the most part, he didn’t live like one.
It was seven o’clock when the car turned off the road. The driveway wound through dense forest and up a small hill, followed by a much steeper one. Once we crested it, the lights of a house shone through the leaves.
“This was what I expected,” I remarked when it came into view, “in Munich.”
A sprawling house was perched on the hillside with large panoramic windows overlooking the wooded ravine below. He pulled the car around the house and up to the four-car garage, then left it running as he got out and punched a code into the keypad to raise a garage door. There weren’t any cars in the garage until he parked there.
He offered to help me out, but I declined. I felt stronger every minute that passed since returning home.
It was no less impressive inside. We wound through the chef’s kitchen and into a living room with built-in bookcases and leather couches, facing a flat-screen TV that covered most of the wall.
He told me to have a seat on a couch and went to finish unloading, but I couldn’t stay here and do nothing. I didn’t want to be alone, not even for a second, so I went back to the kitchen and tried to figure out where to put everything.
And when it was done, he set his tired eyes on me.
“Where should I put your suitcase?” he asked, hesitant.
I smiled. Sweet Shawn was worried about what I was comfortable with. “It goes wherever your luggage goes.”
It went into the enormous primary bedroom, and he tucked it against the wall opposite a fireplace, away from the king-sized bed.
Shawn had spent a ton of money not only to take care of me, but also to bring me to this secluded house. There was little else for us to do but spend time with each other, which had probably been his intention.
That made it impossible not to feel pressure to express my gratitude toward him in an intimate way, even when he hadn’t hinted at that. But the wordobligationflitted through my head as I watched him unbutton his dress shirt.
It wasn’t like I didn’t want to. I absolutely did?—
But I was tired.
And weirdly nervous.
