Page 36 of With This Kiss
Iwas in a bad fucking mood.
Or at least, I had been.
Until I saw her, and now I was just feeling…
Fuck if I knew.
I only knew that with her, things weren’t so loud in my head. The voices had finally quieted.
We drove out of the city.
I snuck glances at her every once in a while to see her reaction, but she was nothing but a picture of calm.
Was her sense of self-preservation off?
We were essentially strangers to each other. I could have taken her up to my cabin in the woods, where there was absolutely no signal, and no one would be the wiser. I shook my head.
I was at least a foot taller than her and outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds. No matter how resourceful shethoughtshe was, she couldn’t run from me if I truly wanted to hurt her. She wouldn’t be able to fight me off.
I shook my head.
Her innocent trust shouldn’t have annoyed me as much as it did.
We didn’t talk during the drive.
I liked that at least.
She seemed to sense when I just needed peace and quiet. When I needed nothing more than her presence and that was all.
We stopped once for gas, but otherwise I kept driving, neither of us saying a word to each other.
And before I knew it, the sun was setting over the horizon, and I must have driven through a good portion of New York already.
I looked over at her when I came to a stoplight.
Her head was leaning against the window, her eyes closed.
She was asleep.
Even sleeping, there was a slight indent between her eyebrows, forming a small frown. I reached over and smoothed out the line, wondering what troubles, what monsters seemed to be haunting her and wouldn’t leave her alone, even in sleep.
And I wondered why I fucking cared.
I shouldn’t care about anything that had to do with a Caparelli.
The light turned green, and I stepped on the gas, moving the car forward.
I came to a stop in front of a cliff overlooking the mountains. It wasn’t like we could see much in the dark sky. But I liked it here.
I liked the quiet… and the calm of everything.
We were about three hours away from the city. There wasn’t another living soul around, at least, not one I could see, and I didn’t know what had prompted me to bring her here in the first place.
I let her sleep as I looked ahead.
There was a streetlight a little distance away that provided just enough lighting for me to make out the outline of her features, and that was all.
It was about ten minutes after I pulled the car up here that she finally roused.
