The ride back was silent and broody, just like the mood in the room before we left. One minute she’s giving me the okay that I can go and offering to make eggs benedict and introduce me to Stan, who I guess she lives with, but the next moment, she’s coming back with Tyson on her heels and he’s gathering me up to take me back to his lair.
I can’t help but feel nervous about being alone with him. The way he’s been with me has been frying my nerves to a crisp.
We get back and he has to fetch his keys from his jeans by the tree before we can go in.
“Eyedrops three times a day unless you shift and it gets better on its own,” she reminds him.
He grunts in response.
***
He kicks the door shut behind us and my body jerks in response to the slam. He’s barefoot, and his face scruff is now officially a bit more than scruff, and it’s yummy. Though, I’m trying to not ogle it too much because we’re obviously in a fight.
He goes still and my hands fiddle with one another from their position in my lap. He sets me down on the sofa and looks around with surprise on his face.
The atmosphere has changed and it’s not subtle. He looks around with big eyes and then his eyes land on me.
The house still smells like lemon dish soap, cinnamon, and wildflowers from my cleaning spree yesterday that used almost the whole bottle of soap. I also sprinkled cinnamon into the fireplaces and on the kitchen burners. It’s evident that it’s much cleaner at a glance even if I only got the floors swept instead of mopped.
He’s eyeing me with that ‘math question’ face again. I say nothing.
Before we got out of the truck, his mother said, “Make her some breakfast and some tea when you get in. She needs to rest today so nothing that requires anything… strenuous. Understand?”
He flexed his jaw muscles in reply.
“Nothing too strenuous,” she repeated. Then winked.
He gave her a subtle nod and that seemed to satisfy her.
“See you tomorrow,” she replied. “I’ll be here around this time. Here’s my phone number if you have any questions or problems. And I gave him two dressing changes for the wound site, Ivy. Change it tonight and again in the morning. Pain pills every four hours. I’ll bring more first aid supplies tomorrow.” She held a card out and I took it.
“Thanks, Cat, but there’s no phone here.”
“I have your phone,” Tyson informed, and this shocked me.
I told her there were some of Riley’s clothes and a pair of boots near the tree and she said she’d grab them and take them back with her. “Our kind tend to leave our clothes absolutely everywhere.” She winked at me and then left.
And now that he’s put me down, he’s walking to the kitchen counter and emptying his pockets of all the things she gave him at the clinic. Pills, bandages and gauze, eyedrops, and my phone plus a cord and charging block.
He lifts a pot out of the cupboard, fills it with water, and sets it on the stove. He turns the stove on, likely to make tea per her orders. After that, he opens the fridge and surveys the ingredients. The fridge is jam-packed from the shopping spree of two days ago.
The table wasn’t dirty yesterday as he’d obviously cleaned it the night before after I went to bed because I noticed it no longer had the sticky-grimy film on it, but I found an actual lace tablecloth deeper in that stuffed armoire in the bedroom and had put it on as well as a pretty (once I washed a decade or two of grime off it) turquoise crackled glass vase I’d found in the back of a cupboard with some flowers I’d picked from the jungle of fragrant wildflowers behind the house.
He leans over and lifts the note I’d put down. His eyes go wide, and I feel self-conscious as he stares at it.
It flutters toward the floor and then he’s erasing the space between us, to get to me and before the paper even lands, he has my jaw in both hands and his mouth is on mine.
His teeth nip my bottom lip, making me gasp and this grants him access with his tongue, which licks at mine. He is devouring me. Devouring me with his mouth and there’s all sorts of heat rising in me along with crazy emotions coming at me from him. From me. Sort of swirling around us both, I think.
Oh. My. God.
What’s happening here?
I’m pulling away, trying to get some air because I can barely breathe. I search his face and the anger that I’ve been looking at since yesterday is just… gone.