Page 68 of A Murderous Crow
I sent an email to one I knew to get an idea of what could be done, loosely describing the situation, then I sat back with my drink and stared into space for I don’t know how long while the wheels turned in my brain on what to do with Savannah.
I wasn’t prepared to live with anyone. A night here or there was just about all I could stand, and while it was true that I admired her more, not less, for having come from modest means and literally self-making her money in the real estate market, her deceit in order to shortcut the line gave me some pause.
Not that I cared that it was unscrupulous. I could honestly give a fuck about that part. If you weren’t playing dirty, then you just plain weren’t playing to win – no what bothered me about it was simply that she had the capacity for that kind of deceit and had slid right by even my keen senses.
If she could lie so easily and readily about something like that… what else could and would she lie about?
Fucking Courtney, I thought to myself.
My mistrust really had more to do with her than with Savannah at all.
“Oh, the tangled webs we weave,” I muttered, and checked the time.
It was nearly three a.m.
I got up and shrugged out of my jacket and cut, hanging them in the nearby coat closet down here. I took off my chaps and hung them, too. I liked to keep an orderly house. I took off myboots and left them in the bottom of the closet before I padded upstairs in my socks.
She was angelic, her hands tucked beneath her cheek as she slept. She’d left the bedside lamp on my side of the bet lit for me, and I didn’t know how to feel about that. It was kind… and that was one of the things that I think had been one of her tells. She was far too kind and selfless to come from money.
Like I said, pieces were starting to fit for me, and the image they created wasvastlydifferent from the image I had built up in my head of who Savannah actually was.
I undressed quietly and slipped nude between the sheets. I just didn’t have it in me to dig out anything to wear, and besides that, she was too beautiful to pass up in the morning if our arrangement could hold – which if anything, tonight’s little revelation had supplied me with yet more leverage to keep it in place.
I just suddenly didn’t know if I had the guts or the heart to play the game as I had been all this time.
I lay down facing her and watched her sleep. She looked troubled, even in her slumber, a fine wrinkle developed between her eyebrows, just above the bridge of her perfect nose.
I’d had her all wrong, and I do meanall wrong…but then there was a part of me that wondered,had I?
She had to have lied somehow, some way, on her application to get under old man Beauregard… but everything after that? She struck me as a ‘by the book’ sort. I think the lesson had been learned by watching her family’s folly on that.
I smoothed some of her long hair out of her face, tucking it behind her ear, and she reached for me in her sleep, cuddling into me as though desperate for my touch, and while itshouldhave bothered me it didn’t. I was surprised, in fact, how desperate I was forhers.
I held her close, her body warm against mine, and closed my eyes.
Sleep caught up to me much too quickly, an indication that I was far more stressed out about her situation that I should have been.
Dawn wasa glimmer on the horizon, just starting to lighten the room when I woke from a dream where Savannah and I walked in a cemetery at night. Hands had reached up from the graves and snatched her from me, screaming as she was pulled into the dirt.
My eyes snapped open, and I looked down. I had somehow wound up on my back, my sleepy bright-eyed kitten practically draped over me, her head on my shoulder and chest, her leg over both of mine, one arm tucked against my body and the other draped over my waist, just above –dangerouslyclose to where my boner tented the sheet.
She wore a cute little satin shorts and tankini sleep set in a peach edged with cream lace that left little if nothing at all to my imagination. I took a deep, deep, breath and my nose was tickled by her peachy scent and I closed my eyes as a sort of peace I hadn’t felt in some time washed over me.
I swallowed hard, and shifted slightly, trying not to wake her, but no dice. She clutched onto me harder and whimpered her wordless complaint and I had to chuckle.
“Time to wake up then, Bright Eyes.” I murmured the words into her hair and kissed the top of her head.
She dragged in a shuddering breath and stretched beside me, popping her neck and groaning.
“What time is it?” she whispered without even opening her eyes.
“Early,” I murmured and she looked up at me, sleepily.
“I need my clothes,” she muttered unhappily. “I need to go to work.”
“We need to talk first,” I chided.
“I know…” she sounded so dejected.
