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“Do you need something?”
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “You.”
She couldn’t have heard that right. All the adrenaline and crackling of her nerves had her brain misfiring. “What did you just say?”
“Nothing.”
The mattress dipped from his weight and her body slid into his. “I can’t seem to calm my nerves. I feel like I’m six seconds from flying apart.”
His palm slipped over her thigh. “It’s aftermath.”
“Do you always feel like this?”
“Just sometimes.” He slid his hand over hers and their fingers entwined. “Your nerve endings are on fire. The danger and fear, the sadness and pain. It’s all mixing and getting jammed up inside you.”
“How do I get rid of it?”
“Different things work for different people.” His thumb rubbed against the back of her hand. Slow, lazy circles that soothed her even as her insides continued to churn.
Bold had worked for her once before. She tried it again. “Any chance kissing does the trick?”
Sheltered
HelenKay Dimon
HELENKAY DIMON, an award-winning author, spent twelve years in the most unromantic career ever—divorce lawyer. After dedicating all that effort to helping people terminate relationships, she is thrilled to deal in happy endings and write romance novels for a living. Now her days are filled with gardening, writing, reading and spending time with her family in and around San Diego. Stop by her website, www.helenkaydimon.com, and say hello.
Thank you to my husband, James, for the trip to Oregon. All that beautiful open space gave me tons of suspense ideas.
Contents
For the third night in a row the wind and rain whipped up the Oregon Coast and smacked into the side of Lindsey Pike’s small cottage. The temps dipped into lower than normal range for late summer, but that was only part of the reason for keeping her windows closed. The other sat about eleven miles away, up a steep hill and behind a locked gate.
But cool temperature or not, a steady banging put her already zapping nerves further on edge. The rattle came first, then the thud. That would teach her to wait on fixing the shutter in the family room until “sometime next week.”
She leaned back into the stack of pillows piled behind her on her bed and reopened her book. After she stared at the same line for what felt like the billionth time, she decided maybe this wasn’t the right night for dry research reading. She slipped her legs over the side of the bed and winced when her bare toes hit the chilled hardwood floor.
She made it two steps down the hallway in search of the perfect mindless magazine before she stilled. Something was off. In the air, in the tight space...something.
Up on the balls of her feet, she spun around, thinking to head back to the bedroom and to the gun she kept locked in a safe in her nightstand. Then it hit her. No banging. The wind still howled and the rafters shook now and then. But no more noise.
Torn between possibilities, she stood there. The poor shutter probably finally blew off. That meant hunting it down tomorrow and reattaching it, properly this time. Even as the rationale hung in her mind her unease increased. The slow churning of dread deep in her stomach spun faster. Yeah, she’d lived through paralyzing anxiety before and knew the sensation never led her wrong.
She turned back toward the family room and saw him. It...whatever. Big and looming and shadowed. Without thinking, she took off in a sprint in the opposite direction. Her feet tapped against the floor as she broke for the bedroom. For the gun and the phone. She’d use the lamp as a weapon if she had to. Anything to survive.