Page 78 of The Pretenders of Copper County
“I just keep thinking there’s been a mistake. I… I thought when I saw that list—” He nodded at my phone on the bed. “—I would be able to say, ‘Aha, Reed! This is where you went wrong.’ But…” He shook his head, and a tear tracked down his cheek.
“Baby.” I brushed my thumb over his cheek, catching the wetness and rubbing it away.
“I already knew he… he wasn’t telling the truth about Alaska,” Chris said in a whisper. “I’m not sure why this is hitting me so hard. I mean… I mean… it’s still possible there’s a mistake, right? Or that Danny’s covering for… someone?” He caught his breath with a little sob.
I opened my mouth to agree with him. To say, “Yeah, baby, that’s totally possible,” even though it wasn’t, just to see him smile again. But wouldn’t that just be another kind of false protection? If I could burn the world to fix this for him, I would. Since that wasn’t an option, I’d give him truth.
“Chris.” I pulled him into a hug. “You remember me telling you before what I knew about Dante, right? This investigation has been going on for a long time. Your uncle knew they had evidence on him, and that’s why he turned himself in. He made this plea deal to avoid prison time. I wish, Iwish, there was another explanation that made sense. But I won’t lie to you, I can’t think of one.”
He rubbed his cheek into my chest, leaving tearstains over my heart. “I know,” he whispered.
“You didn’t read the whole document, so you might not have gotten to the part where it says he’s not going to prison,” I offered. “Once he testifies and forfeits the property as agreed, he’llhave paid his debt to society.”
“That’s good.” Chris sniffed. “But you said there are other people angry at him. He’s going to be in witness protection after he testifies, isn’t he?”
“That’s usually how it goes, yeah.” I ran a hand up and down his spine.
“So, um…” He glanced up. “What will happen to me?” he asked in a small voice.
“You…” My hands tensed involuntarily on his skin. “You have options. Danny could request that you go into protection with him. He’s going to be looking over his shoulder for a while, so that might not be the smartest option, but it exists.” I brushed his hair back from his face so I could see his eyes. The bleakness there killed me. “The other option is… you don’t go into protection. The threat against you was so you could be used as leverage against Danny testifying. Once he testifies, you should be safe.”
“Right.” He closed his eyes. “Safe.”
“You can do anything you want. Go anywhere you want. Back to New Jersey or… or to the Hollow. I’ll take you myself.”
“A round-trip abduction.” Chris forced a smile that was only half as bright as it usually was. “And you’ll, um… you’ll be on to the next person who needs protecting, right?”
I felt like I was choking. “Yeah. Janissey’s already talking about my next assignment, but I…”
But what, Reed?What are you gonna offer?
I wanted to tell him he didn’t need to be alone. That I wanted to be with him.
But all the things I’d thought about when talking to Watt still held true. My job was incompatible with a relationship, which was why I’d chosen not to have one. Chris deserved someone to listen to his stories every day, to holdhim while he fell asleep each night, to wake with his sweet kisses every morning.
I didn’t know how to be that person.
“…but I’m here with you until the trial,” I finished. “Four weeks, at least.”
Chris nodded, then bit his lip, seeming to come to a decision. This time when his smile came, it was nearly bright enough I could pretend not to see the shadows haunting his eyes. “Then I think we need to use our time wisely while we’re here,” he said firmly. “Do the things we… we really want to do.”
I tried to ignore the sinking in my stomach, the feeling that we’d engaged a timer that was slowly ticking down the seconds we had left together. “Cabin 13?”
“No.” He closed the short distance between us, pressing himself against me fully, arms wrapped around my neck. “I want you, Reed.”
“Chris.” I shook my head, trying to clear it. “But…”
“I want to know what it feels like to have you inside me so,sobadly.”
My head was a mass of confusion, but his proximity made my heart beat frantically in my chest, and my cock, which was always primed when Chris was in the room, had zero hesitation.
Just imagining being inside of him made my head empty until it was nothing but a bobbing vessel filled with scattered images of what it would be like to feel the hot clench of Chris’s body around me.
I leaned down and closed my mouth over his, reveling in the familiarity of his kiss. No matter how many times I kissed him, it was exciting and new. I had a vague thought about work—about the meeting Janissey had scheduled for tomorrow to go over my next assignment—but it didn’t standa chance of remaining in my head when my thoughts and senses were so full of Chris.
“Lie down, sweetheart,” I murmured, guiding him onto the bed.
Chris’s eyes followed me as I carefully stripped off his clothes and leaned over periodically to press a kiss to a particularly tempting spot as it was revealed. There was no hesitation or fear on his face. His tear-bright eyes warmed under the attention, and by the time he was fully naked, every trace of his earlier upset seemed to be gone.
