“Step aside, Sophie.”
“No. You said you’d stay for a few days. It’s not time for you to go yet.”
His mouth shaped into an angry slant. “What the hell is up with you?”
“What’s up with me?”
“Yeah,” he accused aggressively. “Why do you want me here so much? I almost flattened your neighbor out there in the yard. What, you like getting it good and hard from a crazy guy? Are you really willing to put up with someone who could be dangerous, that into the thrill of going down on a bomb, Sophie?”
Silence fell like a thick, toxic fog, only the sound of Thomas’s rapid, irregular breathing breaking it.
Sophie shook with rising anxiety and anger. His nostrils flared as he stared down at her. She could see his pulse throbbing rapidly in the opening of his collar.
“Why are you doing this, Sophie?” he repeated in a rasp.
“I have my reasons. And don’t talk to me like that. Ever,” she bit out in a low voice.
The seconds dragged by in the charged silence. He abruptly clamped his eyes shut.
“What if I hurt you?” he asked through a tight jaw, his eyes still closed.
“I wouldn’t let you stay here if I thought you’d hurt me.”
When he opened them after a taut few seconds, he slowly . . . carefully . . . spread his hand along her collarbone, his long fingers touching her neck. He leaned down until their ragged breathing mingled. Sophie thought her heart had leapt straight into her throat, just beneath Thomas’s palm.
“You shine like an angel in my eyes, Sophie, but everything feels so dark right now,” he said through a throat that sounded as if it were surrounded by squeezing fingers. She saw his face flinch briefly in a concentrated agony of pain, but then it vanished.
“I’m sorry,” he said starkly.
He dropped his hand and backed away from her. He stared blankly at her kitchen and shook his head once, as if to clear it. “Something’s wrong,” he mumbled.
“Tell me what, Thomas. What’s wrong?” If only he could say it, she thought desperately.
His brows knitted together, as though he searched for the answer to her question but came up short.
“I feel like . . . the ground has dropped out from under me.” He threw her a furtive glance before he looked away, but he couldn’t hide the shadows in his eyes. “I never would have suspected it; that Rick’s death would do this to me.”
“Are you sure it’s just Rick’s and Abel’s deaths that have you so upset? What about what’s happening with your father?” Sophie asked cautiously.
His expression became shuttered. “That will pass. It has to.” He sighed heavily. The heavy atmosphere of the room seemed to recede as the tension slowly eased out of his muscles.
“That reminds me,” he mumbled, “I need to call my father about the warehouse explosion. The Feds have probably already contacted him about it.”
“Thomas?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you believe you’re . . . safe?”
His jaw swung around. “That I’m safe?”
She nodded her head.
“Why would you ask me that?”
“That . . . that way you responded to Sherman Dolan. It was like . . . like you thought someone was going to come here to . . . to hurt you,” she finished shakily.
“Why would anyone want to hurt me?”