Page 42 of Out on a Limb
The sound of that word coming from his mouth didn’t help anything. “What if I don’t make you go home?”
He was silent for a very long time.
Which wasn’t surprising. Andrew was generally a quiet kind of guy.
Quiet and laid back.
At least I thought he was laid back. Right now I was questioning that belief.
Wondering if maybe Andrew wasn’t as calm and cool as he pretended to be.
He slowly shook his head. “No deal.”
Then his weight lifted from me, stealing the solid wall of heat I liked more than I cared to admit.
“So you’re just going to leave?”
“No.” He hauled me up with him, one arm around my waist as my feet dropped toward the floor. “I’m going to make sure you have something in your stomach. Then I’m going to leave.”
I swatted at the arm holding me upright. “I’m fine.”
If he didn’t want to be here then I sure as hell wasn’t going to make him stay.
“You’re not fine.” He cracked open the door, peeking out before pulling it wide. “If you were fine you wouldn’t have thought you could climb a damn tree.”
“I didn’t think I could climb a tree.” I tried to drag my feet as he pulled me toward the kitchen. “I used a ladder to get in it.”
Phillip came running around the corner, his feet skidding to a stop, neck craning from one side to the other as he stared up at me.
“I’m fine.”
“She’s not fine, Phillip. Don’t let her lie to you.” Andrew kept going, practically carrying me to the kitchen that ran along the back of the house I built a few years ago. He set me down in one of the chairs tucked under the table in the breakfast room before straightening. His hands went to his hips as he stared down at my legs. “That’s going to hurt like hell tomorrow.”
It hurt like hell now, but I wasn’t admitting that. “I’m fine.” I pushed up from the chair. “You can go home now and do whatever exciting things you do.”
One of Andrew’s large hands came to my shoulder and pressed me back down. “I’m not going home.” He turned toward the hall. “And I think you’re the one who does exciting things.”
When he was out of sight I peeked down at the red and inflamed skin of my legs. Particularly my inner thighs. Wine clearly made me think I was capable of things I shouldn’t attempt.
Wine and a few old women with giant balls and even bigger attitudes.
Andrew came back a minute later, carrying a bunch of stuff from my hall medicine cabinet. He dropped it all on the table before crouching down in front of me. “You gonna tell me what you were doing?”
Andrew was the kind of guy who showed up early and left late. He went above and beyond on anything he did.
He was not the kind of person who broke laws and retaliated against the evils of the world.
Telling him what we’d done might fall under the umbrella of making him an accomplice, and I wouldn’t do that to him.
“Bird watching.” It wasn’t a complete lie.
I watched the birds as they fell into the trailer.
He sprayed a few pumps of antiseptic spray on my mangled skin. The second it hit it started to burn.
“Holy shit.” I blew at it, hoping to speed the process up, but I was too far away to do any good. “What in the hell is that?”
“It’s from the medicine cabinet.” Andrew held it up for me. “You’re the one who bought it.”
