When she next felt his fingers drift over her thigh and grip her hand, she jumped, her head spinning to look at him. She couldn’t take his touch right now – anytime but right now.
When his thumb outlined the edges her knuckles, before turning her hand around and tracing the inside of her wrist, she felt the touch all the way to her core, which was now pulsing and hot. She squeezed her thighs together and tried desperately to remember why she needed to pull her hand away – why she needed to stop this seduction right this minute.
With as much effort as she could possibly muster, she pulled her hand away and tucked it between her thighs, waiting for a supernova to come and just obliterate their car. It was so damn hot now, that could be the only explanation. It certainly wasn’t her hormones.
After another ten minutes, she jumped when Byron reached over and squeezed her thigh. “Are you going to remain silent this entire ride?”
“How much longer is the ride going to be?” she countered.
“About thirty more minutes.”
“Where are we going?”
“To one of my favorite places,” he vaguely answered.
“That doesn’t tell me anything,” she said, but her lip turned up just the slightest bit. He was so excited, almost boyishly so, and it was hard for her not to appreciate the change in his demeanor. Even if he was kidnapping her.
“It’s not a well known place, but I’ve been here before. It’s a nice, small resort in the mountains. They have private cabins, while still having all the comforts of home, including room service,” he said.
“Ah, we wouldn’t want to go without room service,” she said before turning to look at him, wishing she could make eye-contact. “How many cabins did you rent?”
Her stomach was nervous as she waited for his answer. “Two, but I’m hoping one of them remains empty,” he said, and she let out the breath she’d been holding.
That he’d rented two meant a lot to her. Yes, he was obviously hoping for sex this weekend – it was the entire purpose of kidnapping her, but he was also giving her enough respect of offering her a separate sleeping quarter if she insisted on it.
“Considering that I want to pull this car off to a nice little logging road and strip your clothes off and touch every single inch of your silky skin right now, it may be a good idea for you to somehow distract me,” Byron said, making her head whip around and look at him in partial shock and partial awe.
“Um…I don’t…um…what do you want to talk about?” she finally managed to get out of her parched throat.
“Tell me about yourself. How did you end up in Seattle?”
That was a subject she really, really didn’t want to talk about. “How about anything other than that?” she said, trying to make it a joke. He wasn’t buying it.
“Everyone has a beginning, McKenzie, even if that beginning isn’t what we think it should have been,” he said.
“Why don’t you tell me about your youth then?” she challenged. His shoulders tensed, but he didn’t back away.
“I may do that, but you first.”
She paused for a moment, because if there was something she knew definitively about Byron, it was that he didn’t lie, and didn’t make promises he wouldn’t keep. He hadn’t said he would tell her, but it was a big step for him to even consider it. It was enough that it loosened her tongue.
“I had a typical childhood when I was younger. Divorced parents, a sister…” She stopped as she choked on that word. She had begun the sentence as a joke, and already had revealed too much.
“Wait!” he said, his head whipping in her direction. “You have a sister?” he asked, his full attention on her.
“Please pay attention,” she gasped when they swerved toward the ditch. He quickly corrected the wheel, then faced forward as he continued driving.
“Yes, I had a sister,” she quietly said, not wanting to talk about it.
“Where is she? Why doesn’t anyone know about her?” He obviously hadn’t picked up on the word “had.”
“When we were thirteen–”
Byron interrupted again. “We?” Of course he’d caught that.
“Susie and I are twins,” she said quietly.
“I’m sorry. I won’t interrupt again,” he said before giving her a sheepish smile. “Or, I’ll try really hard not to,” he amended.
“When we were thirteen, my dad had given us a brand new quad. One of the nice things of being the children of divorce is when daddy comes to town, he’s really trying to be the cool parent, so we always got really expensive, outrageous gifts that would drive our mother crazy. She told us we couldn’t ride it until we were trained. Of course, she worked two jobs and couldn’t exactly monitor us. We lived in a small town outside of Sacramento, up in the hills, and it was summer and we wanted to test out the new toy.”
It hurt to even think about this day, let alone, relive it. She hadn’t spoken about Susie in so long to anyone that her heart was aching tremendously. “Please go on, McKenzie,” Byron said quietly.
“We took turns racing down some old logging roads, each of us fighting over who got to drive and who had to hang on for dear life. It was her turn to drive and she was all sorts of confident at this point. And our father, being who he was, had gotten us the toy but not the safety items needed with it. Neither of us had helmets.”
McKenzie closed her eyes as she relived a brief second in time that had changed her life forever. “You can stop,” Byron said, squeezing her thigh in reassurance. Yes, of course he thought he knew how this story was going to end.
“She didn’t die,” she whispered so softly she wasn’t sure if Byron heard her or not.
“What?” he gasped, turning toward her again before realizing what he was doing and facing back forward.
“No, I felt guilt for years, because I wished she would have. It would have been better,” she said.
“Tell me, McKenzie.” It was a soft plea.
“We were going too fast and we came to a corner there was no way we could take at those speeds. We flew over the cliff and while still in the air, hit a tree,” she said, a tear falling from her eye. “I blacked out immediately, but later they put all the pieces together and figured out what happened.”
She took a few moments and composed herself before telling Byron something she hadn’t told another living soul. How sad her life was that she had no one she could truly share with. No. She had Jewell now, but Jewell had a husband and responsibilities. It didn’t matter. McKenzie wasn’t normally the sharing type. She didn’t understand why she was telling all of this to Byron – a man who most certainly didn’t care about her at all.