Page 35 of Tell Me Why
“You should rest more comfortably here, and we will speak again at dark.”
Isabella dipped her head to them, then went back out the door.
The door made a very dense set of noises, and the air pressure in the room went up slightly, suggesting that they were air-tight in here.
Tina popped her ears, then looked at Tell, who had immediately started going through the room in detail, quiet fingers touching and moving everything.
He put his finger to his lips as he worked, and Tina went to sit on the queen-sized bed and crossed her ankles, just waiting.
She wasn’t going to share this bed with him.
Nothing else particularly mattered, right this second, because what was going to happen next as far as Tina was concerned was completely fated and out of her control.
So long as someone didn’t come in and hurt her while she was incapacitated.
Would they do that?
Would Tell have let her walk into that without a fight?
He would.
But only if there was no other option.
Were they so well-and-truly captured as that?
She didn’t think that Isabella-Crissy -Crissy- had seemed the type, but Daryll was a complete unknown, yet.
Tina reached down to unzip her boots, then tipped sideways onto the bed, still watching Tell work.
He made his way around the room, then came to sit next to her.
“Things are very tenuous from here,” he said quietly. “I don’t know what will happen, and I am not willing to speak out loud what I suspect or what I would anticipate. But I will not let them touch you as you are under the sun. Trust me in this.”
She nodded, then he stood and slid the blankets out from under her - she didn’t need them, but they were comforting all the same - and tucked her in, waiting in the center of the room until a foursome of men brought in and assembled a second bed.
He went to shower and change - where he got black silk pajamas, she couldn’t imagine, but there they were - then he turned out the lights and lay down.
At the penthouse, she could hear him shift, during the day, but here she could hear him breathe.
It was comforting.
The day came.
Tell was up before Tina,obviously, and he went through the room again after he made the bed and changed back into the same clothes he’d been wearing the day before. Somehow no one evernoticedthat he was wearing a black button-up shirt and black slacks, and while hecouldanddidwear other things, this was his default, particularly on a day when he was going to be staying in, and it just… it tickled Tina funny that no one looked at him and went…vampire.
Obviously no one in their right mind woulddothat, but she couldn’tnotdo it.
She watched him as he went through the room again, strong enough to get up but not confident enough to do it gracefully, and he glanced at her from time to time as though he were measuring her, but said nothing.
She wasn’t afraid.
Sure, they were down here without anyone knowing where they were, including Hunter, and they were at the mercy of a woman who was playing a very cool, very calculated game, but she was with Tell, and he wasn’t worried yet.
He looked almost exactly the same when hewasworried as when he wasn’t, but his promise had been to make her feel calmer, not a Pyrrhic threat.
And she was getting to the point where she could pick out some of his more subtle moods. She thought that he was letting herseethem, where he didn’t do that with others, and… it was an honor.
Finally, she sat up. Tell turned his back to her, going through a bookcase with more attention to detail and pointedly lettingher know that he wasn’t going to fuss over her. She never got up fast or clean in the morning, and frankly that went back to before she’d been turned vampire, and she was fine with this.
