Page 17 of A Captive Situation

I’d just let myself segue down a little Jake rabbit hole and I ended up ready to murder Beck. Now this? I was back here again? Or was it that I was going to jump the first guy that caught my eye?

But even thinking that, I was warring with myself because my body was saying one thing while my mind was saying a totally different thing. I wanted to go to him, press against him, but also I didn’t know him. He was a stranger to me.

He had stopped in his tracks, taking in how I was taking him in, and we could do that now because his cousin wasn’t acting as a buffer. Joke was on her. She’d pulled me in to be the buffer, but the buffer had actually been her.

I took a deep breath in, cooling some of my hormones down. He eyed me, his gaze heating up, but he closed his eyes, and I felt that same distance landing between us. That was him. He was doing the pull-away thing again. My chest hurt at feeling that.

But also, had I done something? I didn’t know what I’d done.

When he spoke, his voice was gruff. “I know of a diner in the city. Want to grab some food? Unless it’s too far out of the way of where you’re staying?” He nodded to his truck, pulling his keys out. He went around to his side and I got in where his cousin had been. It felt more intimate being up here, being so close.

I folded my hands in my lap and tried to breathe out some of my nerves.

“Is that okay with you? If we stop on the way to—where am I taking you?”

I nodded again, quickly. I told him the name of my hotel. I did not tell him that tonight was my last night there and tomorrow, I didn’t know where I’d be going.

“Yeah. No. That sounds good to me.” I wrung my hands together the entire way there.

I was thirty-six. I had lived almost the last two decades for someone else, and what was I now? A nervous teenager?

I was going to make everything another item on the bucket list. For that reason alone, sign me up.

Remembering what it felt like to be a teenager again? Check.

A cute neighborhood-style eatery? That could be added to the list. This place was adorable.

We sat in silence until the server brought over our coffee. She put another smaller bowl next to it, filled with creamer. “Anything else, sweetie?” That seductive tone was not intended for me.

I scowled.

“We’re good. Thank you.” Jake kept his eyes on me as he spoke to her.

“Anything for you, Jacob.” Her hand went to his shoulder and lingered. I scowled even more at that move. She had ignored me from the first moment we entered, but her eyes went my way now, narrowing a fraction before she went to another table.

“Come here often?Jacob?”

He picked up his own coffee, frowning at me. “She used to fuck my brother a long time ago. She doesn’t know shit about me. It’s Jake.” He continued to watch me and since I didn’t know what all to say, I busied myself adding some creamer to my own coffee.

My mind was going a million miles here. So much that I didn’t even taste my coffee. I put my mug down, looking back at my lap. At my hands. “Why are we here?”

He’d been heated earlier. Then we drove here and in that time frame, he got chillier and chillier toward me.

Now he was just outright like ice.

His cold appraisal lingered on my face, his own eyes narrowing, before he dismissed me and lifted his coffee back up for a drag. He sat back and shook his head. “For food? Because my cousin needed a pawn to truss up between us, and for whatever reason, you volunteered.” His eyes narrowed on me. “Maybe I should be asking you that question. Why are you here, Sawyer?”

My mouth watered, parting. That was the first time he’d said my name.

I liked it. I liked it a lot.

Then I realized he was actually asking. He was waiting for a response, so I leaned back in my seat and shrugged. There was no way I could tell him the truth of what I was doing here, but I could vague it up. “I’m being a tourist.” If he knew all of it, he wouldn’t want anything to do with me.

“A tourist?”

“Yeah. That’s what people who don’t live here come here and do. They tourist. It’s a verb. Active.”

He was looking at me like he didn’t believe me.

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