Page 28 of Townshipped
After a while, I sit up, pushing away from Aiden. I wipe my face with my hand. “I’ll be okay now,” I tell him. “Thank you.”
“You sure?” he asks. “I could set up camp in the chair again. It’s surprisingly comfortable.”
“It’s comfortable to sleep sitting up in an antique wingback?” I ask with a smile.
“I hear people will be trading in beds for wingbacks any day now. It’s a trend.”
We chuckle. I look up into his hazel eyes. The warm glow of the lamp only serves to accentuate the kindness in his expression. He’s strong. Steadfast. We’re only less than a foot apart from one another. I feel the tug. It’s not merely a longing to have him hold me again.
He’s almost more handsome in the middle of the night than he is in daylight. His hair is mussed from sleep. His shirt hugs his torso, showing off the ripple of muscles beneath. His plaid pajama pants hang low on his hips.
He effortlessly exudes a heady masculinity.
But it’s more than that. It’s him.
Aiden’s been so good to me the past six days—and he would be to anyone. The wordswhite knightflash through my head. I hear them in a woman’s voice that isn’t my own, but then the memory melts away before I can identify the owner of the voice or make sense of why I thought of that phrase and why it seemed particularly significant.
Aiden stands.
“Thank you again,” I say.
“Anytime. You’ll get through this,” he assures me. “And I’m not kidding about the chair. I’m here if you need me.”
He points up to the ceiling. His room is right there, just over mine.
“Thanks,” I say, wiping a stray tear.
He flicks the lamp off and walks to the door, looking at me one more time without saying another word. I snuggle back under my covers and Aiden slowly shuts the door behind himself.
* * *
“I’m startingto feel like a freeloader,” I tell Aiden over breakfast the next morning.
“You’re healing. Hazel said you need to rest a lot the first five days after an accident like yours.”
“And today it’s been a week,” I remind him. “Are you good at resting?”
“Me?”
I look at him over a forkful of Hopple Popple and raise my eyebrow.
“Okay. No. I don’t rest well. I mean, I relax. Every night I force myself to turn off work and either read, watch a show, or spend time with friends or family. But just resting if I had to? Nah. I’d go stir crazy.”
I point my fork toward myself. “Stir crazy. I’m the poster child for stir crazy right now. As a matter of fact, if there were a Stir-Crazy Society, I could be president. They’d give me an award for putting the stir in crazy. Or maybe I’m putting the crazy in stir. Either way, I’m stirring up the crazy over here.”
I pause, realizing how this must sound to him.
He’s just sitting there grinning at me like I’m the morning entertainment.
“And don’t get me wrong. I’m incredibly grateful for all this.” I gesture around the kitchen. “But I need a purpose and something to make me feel useful. I get the feeling I didn’t sit still much in my past life.”
“Is that what we’re calling it now? Your past life?”
“Yep.”
“So, you’re like a cat with nine lives? Or Shirley MacLaine?”
I squint and look upward. The image of Shirley MacLaine miraculously comes into view. “She was in a movie, right?”
