Page 62 of Break the Ice
“There’s one last thing to show you.” Still holding on to my hand, he takes me down the side of the glasshouse, up a set of wood-slatted concrete steps that he navigates ahead of me, acting like a blindfold.
“Unless it’s raining or really cold, this is where I like to come to read.” Jayden stands to the side, gesturing around us while I freeze.
Terror.
That’s the first thing that hits me.
Bile burns up my throat as I will myself to move. To step back. To say something. Anything while he watches me, waiting for my reaction.
“Is something wrong?” He asks, stepping in front of me again. “Finley?”
Gripping his book tightly, he leans closer, leveling me with a pleading frown. Like he might lose his mind if I don’t answer him.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, focusing on the way his thick fingers blanche around his book while I clutch the ones in my hand firmly. I’m shivering hot and cold, mortified and scared. “I don’t… I can’t…”
“You can’t swim.” He assumes what I can’t tell him because I’m desperately trying not to get pulled into the panic attack brewing in my chest.
Tight. Relentless. Unforgiving. As cruel as the taste of chlorine ghosting my tongue and stinging my eyes. I’m choking on the memory of drowning. Again and again, until his hands grasp my shoulders with a bruising force, pulling me into his chest.
The water fountain. The pool. I’ve answered my question about why Elijah hadn’t brought me up here.
It’s the silver lining of my terror. As always, he was protecting me.
“It’s okay, Lucky. Lots of people don’t know how to swim, but I can teach you if you want… when you want.”
I suck in a deep breath, past the swelling in my throat, with a wheeze.
Jayden smells good. Woodsy and citrusy with a sweetness that warms through me, allowing me to center myself.
I don’t have the strength to tell him that I know how to swim, I’m simply too scared to go anywhere near deep water. I can’t remember the last time I had a bath.
It’s as pathetic as Presley calls me.
“We don’t have to stay up here,” Jayden tells me when I back into the glass balustrade. With another appraising glance, he asks, “Do you want to go back down there? To the deck chairs?”
Desperately.
I’d love nothing more than to put as much distance as I can between me and the infinity pool behind him. But this is his spot. Where he comes to get away from the world, and after he’s been so kind to me, it’s not fair for me to take him away.
“Umm… no, that’s okay. I can sit over there.” I nod to the large sun bed draped with a striped canopy by the shallow end of the pool. “Seems like a great spot to read.”
“It is.” Jayden heads toward the plush double chaise, picking up a couple of towels as well as two water bottles and soda cans from a bamboo cabana on the way.
How’s it possible for a person to be so at ease with themselves? There hasn’t been a day in my life where I haven’t watched my every action. Considered every move I make and word I speak carefully.
“Are you going to stand there the rest of the afternoon?” He asks, throwing his book along with the drinks and towels on the sun bed before he takes off his shirt and hangs it on one of the posts.
Oh Jesus.
His body is as insane as Elijah’s. Slabs of muscle beneath taut skin. They work out like machines, so it shouldn’t surprise me. Yet every time I see them like this—rounded shoulders, broad chest tapering down to a chiseled stomach and strong, defined hips—I’m still blown away.
“Finley?”
My eyes jerk up from his pierced navel.
Oh my!
“Are you coming?” Jayden leans into one of the posts with a cocky smirk that has the pronounced thrum of my pulse hammering through me as I meander to him, sticking to the glass balustrade, as far away from the pool as I can get.
