Cash paused and reached down to tilt her head back. He frowned down at her. “I think she’s exhausted.”
To her shock, he lifted her up into his arms and carried her outside. She should have protested, but before she could even figure out how to do that, she was sitting in the back of a truck.
This wasn’t Crystal, and she didn’t think it was Butch’s either, considering it wasn’t pristinely clean.
No, this one had some food wrappers scattered around, and there were coloring pens and a coloring book in the back of the seat in front of her.
“Sorry about the mess,” Ink said as he got into the passenger seat. There was a strange man in the driver’s seat. “This is my truck even though Stone is driving. This stuff is mostly from driving my daughter around.”
Addie nodded, and she glanced around as she realized that no one else was in the car, except for her and Cash in the back and Stone driving.
“We thought we’d mix things up a bit. Captain, one of my other men, is driving another car with your sisters. I’ll get someone to pick up the other vehicles and bring them later.”
“Addie, meet Ethan Stone,” Cash said. “Stone. This is Addie. She doesn’t say much when she’s stressed and anxious. How is your throat? Does it hurt?”
She wobbled her hand in the air. So-so. Which wasn’t entirely true. Her throat definitely hurt. All she wanted was a hug but shewasn’t sure how to ask for one. She leaned against the door, but the window was cold, and for some reason, she was shivering.
Suddenly, something warm was placed around her, and she glanced down to see that Cash had taken off his jacket and set it over her.
“You’re shaking,” he said. He fiddled with the controls for the back seat, and the seat beneath her bottom grew warm.
A feeling of relief filled her, and her muscles started to relax. Of course, her stomach chose that moment to let out a loud growl. Shoot, that was embarrassing.
Cash shot her a look. “That might explain why you’re shivering. You’re exhausted and hungry. We need to get some food into you.”
“The safe house is fully stocked,” Ink said from the passenger seat, where he was doing something on his phone. “I’m just going to set up a roster so they always have someone with them for the next few days.”
“I’ll be there,” Cash told him.
He would be? Relief filled her. She hadn’t considered that somebody would stay at the safe house with them, and to have a stranger there would have been really hard on her. It was bad enough that she was going to be staying in a strange place without her own bed or her things around her, but having someone in the house that she didn’t know, she wasn’t sure how she would handle that.
Addie was already on edge from spending days in that hotel room, and then having someone trash it. Even though it wasn’t her space, it still felt like an invasion.
Addie needed her routine back. Reaching down, she picked up her bag and placed her hand inside it so that she could feel Snaggles.
Instantly, she felt a bit better, more settled.
A bit like how she felt in Cash’s arms. But it was probably best that she didn’t think about that.
Cash’s gaze moved down to her hand, where it was hidden inside her bag. Leaning over, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled something out.
It was her cube squishy! She’d been wondering where it was.
“You left this in my truck.” He handed it over to her, and she took it with a grateful smile, squeezing it firmly. That helped a lot.
Ink turned. “I might need to get one of those.”
“What is it?” Stone asked.
“One of those stress ball squishy things. Might help me cope every time I get a phone call about the twins.”
“You probably just burst it with how hard you’d be squeezing it after a phone call like that,” Stone told him.
“Good point,” Ink replied. “My twin boys are a handful. They’re in college, which you’d think would mean that they’d start behaving themselves and making better decisions. But they nearly got kicked out last month because they hacked into this guy’s phone and blasted his content across all of the computers campus wide.”
Holy heck.
How had they done that? And why?
