Sterling (6 page)

I palmed his forehead and gave it a slow push as I got up from my chair and paced over to the fridge. There were strange meats and cheeses on the shelves that I wasn’t quite sure of so I dug a little deeper.

Reaching in, I picked up a bowl of what looked like thick, red blood. Adam’s bare feet made sticky noises as he crossed the floor.

“What the hell is this?”

“Dragonfruit.” He snatched it and frowned. “Or at least, it used to be.” He tilted the bowl giving it a skeptical appraisal.

“Looks like dragon’s blood.”

Adam slid the contents into the trash and I pulled out the jar of pickles from the fridge. When I turned back around, all the color drained from my face.

Adam spun around holding a knife.

The pickles slid free, crashing to the floor as my hands covered my throat. His eyes flashed back and forth between me and the knife before he tossed it into the sink.

When I stepped sideways, my foot rolled on a pickle and I lost balance. Everything tilted as I made a hard landing on my side. Adam dove forward but it was too late, I hit the floor on my hip and came pretty close to smacking my head on the cabinet.

“Goddammit!” he scolded. But I was already in his arms as he lifted me up and set me on the counter. “Are you okay?”

I cringed.

He placed a hand over my chest and I looked down at the odd gesture. He was feeling my heart race and knew it was more than a clumsy fall. “I’m not yelling at you, I’m yelling at me,” he said.

“I’ll clean it.”

Ignoring me, he bent over and turned my legs in his hands. “No cuts.” Then he checked my arms and lowered his eyes to my hip. “You’ll live.”

“That’s a relief.” So was his concern. It was a strange reaction but I thought about the men in my past and he just didn’t fall in the same category.

Adam cared.

“What do you do for a living?” I wondered aloud. Something was off about Adam; he wasn’t like anyone I had ever met. High school dropout or not, he had intelligence in addition to agility. Strength combined with such a gentle spirit and warrior eyes that were haunted.

Leaning in with a hard posture, he closed the space between us. “Do you want me to show you?”

Goosebumps scattered across my arms when his hand slid up my leg over the pickle juice and he suddenly lifted me off the counter, carrying me through the house until we came to a door in the living room.

“Open it.”

“The closet?” I stared at the doorknob.

He snorted. “That’s no closet.”

I liked him holding me so I stalled. “If there are jars full of heads in there, I don’t want to know.”

A frown pushed through his humored expression, carving a few small lines around his eyes. “Do you want to see or not? Be nice or I won’t cook my world famous enchiladas.”

I clamped my mouth shut.

In the past couple of weeks I learned one hard fact—Adam had a gift with food. I simply had a gift of putting it in my mouth. Eating it was only half the pleasure, watching him prepare it, cook it and serve it was like foreplay.

“That’s better,” he said in a voice rich with honey and purr. “How did you get a name like Zoë Winter?”

“My cold, cold heart.”

He squeezed me ever so slightly in protest.

“My father donated his sperm and my middle name.”

“Come again?”

“I don’t have anything nice to say about a man I never met. Like most men, he didn’t stick around.”

Adam dipped down and opened the door, it swung slow and heavy revealing a completely black room. No windows.

“Flip the switch, my hands are full.”

“You could always put me down.”

The door kicked shut behind him and we stood in the dark. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“I’d rather not know if this is any insight to your vast spandex collection, so if you could just warn me now?”

I heard the smile in his voice. “Then consider yourself forewarned, woman.”

Adam brushed the switch with his shoulder. A red glow illuminated from a series of red lamps that hung from the ceiling over a workbench filled with trays, bottles, and equipment.

“Put me down,” I breathed.

Adam let me go and stood by the door as I walked to the center of the room. The back wall was lined with built in cabinets and drawers. On the left was a smooth white table with a magnifying glass on it. To my right was a weathered chair with a projector on a table.

“You’re a photographer.”

I walked over to several photographs hanging on a line: an old barn, a lazy cat stretched over a tractor wheel, a man on the street swinging a little boy over his head that looked three shades of tickled. I was peering into the mind of Adam and how he saw the world around him.

“These are so good.”

I turned to look at him and he leaned against the door with his arms folded.

“It’s my life and salt, the only thing that has kept me going. I needed to be able to look through the lens and see something good in the world.”

Leaning on my elbows I raked my fingers through my hair with a little frustration building up. “You know, sometimes I think that I’m not the only one keeping secrets.”

I dropped my head down and gasped.

A photograph was peering out from behind another and I pulled it out. It was me, lying on the bed with my fists curled up on my chest like a feral thing about to fight. My body was smeared in blood, my shirt was ripped—how could I have survived?

The picture vanished with a snap of a wrist when Adam saw what I found.

“I’m sorry Zoë, I forgot I had it.” He turned around and cursed under his breath. “I wanted to get evidence of what happened. I never meant for you to see it.” His fingers let go and it flew in an angle across the floor.

I stepped up behind him and hugged my body against his back. “I’m sorry you were dragged into this.”

That’s when he shifted around. “Sorry?”

“Say the word and I’ll go.”

Adam startled me when he pulled me into a hug. “You’re not going anywhere, Z.”

“Z?” I snorted into his shirt. “Since when did we get on such friendly terms?”

“Ready for some chow?” Adam planted a soft kiss on my nose before opening the door.

I reached over to flip out the light.

“I’m starving, so it better be world famous.”

“Zoë?”

“Yes?”

A finger brushed along the curve of my jaw. “Some men do stick around.”

Chapter 5

Biting wind slapped my face as the ground beneath my feet hurtled by.
There was no sense of feeling to it. I was on the run.

I wanted to slow but he was right on my heels; I couldn’t see him but I could feel him closing the distance with every perilous step. A tree branch tore my cheek as the brush became thicker.

So dark, I can’t see
.

The forest snapped beneath his stride and when sudden explosions lit up the path; I realized it was from lightening bolts that tore through the sky moving horizontally on either side of me. Euphoria and danger mixed into a dangerous poison.

“You can’t run from me little girl. I’m going to find you and when I do I’m going to crack your skull.”

Bile rose in my stomach…I had no sense of where he was anymore. Risking another glance, I slammed against something hard and unmoving.

My head flew up staring at two pools of green light—his unholy gaze terrified me with every flicker. I cried out when his fingers bruised my arm, shaking me harder with their impossible iron grip.

“Let’s finish this progeny…show me where you are!” he demanded.

“No! Let me go!”

Gasping for breath, I opened my eyes staring into Adam’s panic-stricken face. His arms were the ones gripping mine—he was the one shaking me.

“Wake up! Wake the fuck up, Zoë,” he commanded.

Adrenaline surged in my veins and leaked out of every pore. I had a violent reaction and thrashed about.

“Don’t touch me!” I yelled, and his hands went comically up as if the cops had him under arrest.

The leather sofa, I’m on the sofa. Just a dream, wasn’t it? His voice was so real.

“Christ, I heard you screaming.” Adam wiped his face against his bicep and blew out a breath. “I thought someone was in here, you were shouting.” He lowered his arms and I glanced up at a vein protruding from his neck with an unbelievably hard rhythm.

“I wasn’t shouting.” I whined.

Suddenly, Adam leaned down and gave me a cold stare. “Tell me everything that motherfucker did to you.”

My senses returned; I was only caught between dream world and real world for a few fractions of a second.

“I didn’t mean to…”

What—flip out on him? Smack him? Mooch off him or intrude on his life?

“Scare you.”

He smoothed my hair away from my eyes with his hand and my self-doubts drained. I felt safe with Adam. Yet, the dream stuck to me like tree sap and while I could wash it all I like, there would still be residual stickiness.

“You have no idea how close I was to coming in here and putting holes in someone.”

“Adam, don’t be ridiculous.”

It was then that I glanced to the floor and saw a black gun. That scared me a little because Adam didn’t strike me as the type who carried weapons. This was a far cry from a county redneck’s shotgun collection—that piece looked like something a cop would carry.

It wasn’t until I noticed his wolfish grin that I broke the silence.

“What’s so funny?” I pulled myself to sitting position, that’ll teach me to take an early evening nap.

“You called me Adam.”

“Well don’t get all warm and gushy. It was a slipup, it won’t happen again
Raze
.” I teasingly shocked him in the bicep with a snap of static, but he didn’t jump.

“You’re no fun.”

“How’s that?”

“Sunny always jumps when I shock her. Maybe you aren’t quick enough on your reflexes.”

“My reflexes are just fine where it counts.” I posed a questioning glance from the double entendre.

“I didn’t know cavemen came to the rescue of a damsel in distress, I thought they just clonked them over the head with a big stick and—”

That’s when he cut me off and playtime was over. My shoulders hunched up as I looked into those eyes burning with restrained anger. He leaned in so we were nose to nose and I held my breath.

“
Never
do that again.”

I hit a raw nerve. Pieces of a puzzle began falling together from earlier conversations.

“How did she die?”
Meaning his sister
.

Adam sucked in his bottom lip and released it slowly. It caught my attention as it glistened and for a brief moment, for whatever reason, my blood heated for him. I lifted my gaze to his rich brown eyes and noticed that they were fixed on
my
mouth. I became self-conscious of every movement they made.

And my lips were dry—damn if I didn’t need to lick them, but I made every effort not to go that route.

“She was killed in an alley when we were twenty-one,” he said leaning back.

“I’m so sorry. Can I ask what happened?”

I didn’t care for that look of guilt.

“We were bar hopping, the kind of thing you do when you get legal. I started talking shit to these guys in an alley when they were cat calling the girls and they jumped us. One girl was taken out right away and I was too busy beating the shit out of one of the guys to even notice that it had been my sister to go next. That fucking animal tossed her over like a pile of garbage.” It seemed to take all the strength he had to draw in another breath. “I was looking for a fight when I should have been protecting her. He took everything from me.”

“Were they arrested?”

“No, they got away. I could have chased them down but they took off fast and…I couldn’t leave Bell lying next to a dumpster.” This was something that took place years ago but for him, it was yesterday. Adam didn’t just lose a sibling, he lost the other half of him.

“She was so young, but
so were you
Adam. You can’t protect someone all the time—it wasn’t your fault. You did what you could but you are not responsible for her death, I hope you realize that.”

He looked like a man who had been punishing himself and running away his entire life.

“Sunny was the closest person to me and I hope she isn’t blaming herself for leaving me at that train station. Things happen, it wasn’t her fault.” I stopped because that was the most detail I had given Adam on that night and his eyes rose to meet mine. “I know your sister would tell you that if she could.”

I placed my warm hand over his. “Adam...”

Hearing his name triggered something in Adam, and his body leaned in slow like a predator. His lips brushed over mine and Adam hesitated, savoring the first touch and perhaps waiting for me to reciprocate. The moment I did—he ignited.