Not something I’ve ever needed before but so very real right now.
I need to touch and be touched, to know that my worth isn’t down the drain alongside the rest of my sad little life in Tanglewood. But I can’t bother him with that. He’s my jailer and my caretaker, not my lover. He doesn’t need to be bothered with this, with me.
He catches my wrist as I move to leave, so quick I can only gasp.
“Stay,” he murmurs.
TEN
The prince came to a chamber of gold, where he saw upon a bed the fairest sight one ever beheld—a young princess who looked as if she had just fallen asleep.
Jessica
This was the part where I should leave. Where I should tell this man, who’s clearly good down to his bones, that I’m bad news. Where I ignore everything but survival, because that’s the only way I’ve survived this long. Instead he asks me to stay, and I do.
If Stefano were to find me here, if Finn were to confront him…
Regardless of what I want or wish for, the only thing I can do is run. The only thing I can trust is isolation. But what happens when people are together, really together, when they become intimate in a way beyond bodies hurting one another? I never knew, even though I should, and like a dense fog, it kept me apart.
But drunk on sleeplessness and a shimmering sense of wonder, I see things clearly. If I’m wrong, if I make a fool of myself with him, it would be okay. He would make it okay.
So there’s no way I can ignore his raw request for my company or the tremor in my own body that whispered—yes, I want that too, stay with me. No way I can leave now, not until morning.
“I’ll stay,” I say softly.
He curses softly. “No, you should go. I’m still half-asleep right now and my self-control isn’t what it should be. I’m about two seconds from acting inappropriately. I mean, really inappropriately.”
My nose scrunches. That would normally be enough to send me running, but the truth is that I wouldn’t mind inappropriate behavior right now.
Being desired feels a lot better than being afraid.
He blows out a breath, sitting up in the cot. “And I think most of all, the Town Council would really mind the dirty thoughts the Sheriff is currently having about his prisoner. Yeah, they would not appreciate that at all.”
“I thought you said I wasn’t under arrest.”
“I’m hereby placing you under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Now go back to bed.”
Instead of listening I climb onto the cot beside him. “This is exactly my problem, every time. You’re just like every other guy. You ask me on a date and then you just… you just arrest me.”
His lips quirked. “Happens to you often, does it?”
All the time. All the time I’m left with the dark shame of being not good enough, of being the girl with a man banging on her apartment door, drunk and angry, instead of a man who loved her. I swallow hard, turning away so he can’t see my tears.
“Hey.” This time when he catches my wrist, it’s light, tentative, barely a touch. “I’m sorry. I’m an asshole, really. If it’s any consolation, I know I am.”
“Why would that console me?”
“We don’t need to talk about me. Let’s talk about you. You can tell me why you were driving like a bat out of hell out of Tanglewood. It’ll be better than not sleeping on these damn cots, especially when the night is so…”
The night was so very something, I know exactly what he means, and lying on a hard cot in a lonely jail cell by myself is too depressing. Sitting on a hard cot beside a self-confessed ass is marginally better. Even if he is a cop.
I settle in, connected to him only by the felt blanket we share.
“He’s a cop,” I say, though that short sentence can’t possibly express everything.
He seems to understand anyway, his body stiffening beside me. “Jesus.”
“A dirty cop. I’m sure you’re shocked about that. I’m sure you thought a man scared me bad enough to fly out of the city like a bat out of hell is just a nice upstanding law enforcement officer.” I meant to sound relaxed, but my voice got high pitched at the end—then broke.
“That’s terrible,” he says, his voice low.
“We were together. I lived with him. It wasn’t exactly…” Consensual. “But I just couldn’t see a way out. Then I missed my period. And another one.”
I glance at him, but he already knows where it’s going. The proof of that is five feet away, sleeping soundly. Deep breath. “Stefano didn’t want anything to do with a baby. I thought he would do something drastic. Beat me until I lost the baby. Maybe drug me and take me to a clinic. In the end he threw me out. It was such… God, it was such a relief.”
Fury flashes in those brown eyes, so different from the soft way he looked at me a few minutes ago, different even from the careful casualness on the road. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t have any money, but I had a few friends leftover from school. People who understood why I couldn’t keep in contact, why I had to drop out—”
“Wait. How old were you when this Stefano fucker took you?”
The word fucker startles me, but not as much as the word took. There are other ways he could have said it, ways other people would have said it. How old was I when we started dating? How old was I when I moved in with him?
Finn seems to understand the subtext, but then he did recognize the tattoo.
That’s exactly what happened. I was gifted by my father. Taken by Stefano.
“Fourteen.”
Finn sucks in a breath. “Jessica, how old are you now?”
“I’m eighteen now, okay? So don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry. You want me not to worry about you, when you’re admitting that you were essentially trafficked as a girl, that you were abused and battered and—”
“Stop please,” I say, wincing at those words. They land like stones on my skin. “I’m not excusing what happened. I’m not saying it was okay, only that I survived.”
“Yes,” he says, the admission coming gravely. “You did.”
“And I want to stay that way.”
“I’m going to help you, Jessica.”
“You don’t understand. Stefano, the people he knows, they’re dangerous.”
He makes a small sound. “Do you know what I did before I became a cop?”
“You were a boy scout?”
“I told drugs. Occasionally I helped run guns.”
My insides turn cold. I scoot away from him on the thin mattress. “You’re a dirty cop.”
“No, beautiful. That was before. Before the accident.”
By degrees I feel myself relax. “What happened?”
“I was driving on this road, the same one where I found you. Running guns for this asshole who paid a lot of money not to ask questions. I had a woman in the car with me. It was only…” He looks almost ashamed. “Only sex between us. Only money. I picked her up in a bar in Tanglewood, determined to have a good time.”
My stomach clenches. Stefano’s work is incredibly dangerous, so much so that it became my dream. That he would one day wind up dead. That he would never come home.