Forced Proximity (Bluebell House Duet Book 1)
Forced Proximity: Chapter 26

What the fuck had I been thinking, taking my bike when Connor pressed the emergency-alert tracker? Clearly, I hadn’t been. I hadn’t thought things through because I’d just realized that Eve was missing and then Connor pressed his SOS… Logic hadn’t factored in.

The worst part about driving the hours back to campus with her small hands clutching my jacket and her thighs pressed against mine? I wanted to enjoy it. I liked being around her, but even with the barrier of leather between our skin, it took all my willpower to keep myself under control and not crash.

By the time we got back, I was both dripping sweat and shivering as pure, undiluted trauma coated every inch of my skin beneath the bike leathers. I was utterly disgusted with myself.

I heard Eve’s small protest as I smoke-bombed myself out of her vicinity, and it gutted me.

Why was I such a fucking mess? Oh yeah. Trauma. It was amazing how fucked up a guy could be after enduring torture in a Serbian prison camp as a young teen.

After showering and taking a Valium, I was calm enough to try and apologize to the mysterious, violet-haired temptress living down the hall. Trouble was, Andrew had apparently pissed her off and she’d locked herself in her room.

“You don’t have a lot of experience with people, do you?” I asked him when I found him ironing his dress shirts in his room.

His head jerked up from the perfect pleat he was pressing. “And you do?”

I folded my arms, leaning against the doorframe. “Never said I did. But even a social outcast like me knows not to pick a fight with a woman who just survived a kidnapping. Did it occur to you that she might be fragile right now?”

Andrew glared daggers, placing his iron carefully on the holder so not to burn anything. His glares had no effect on me, and he damn well knew it. I didn’t give a fuck who his Mommy was.

“Did it occur to you that you’re on a dozen government watch lists and any number of those organizations would have wet their pants to snatch you up the moment you left Meadowridge grounds?” He folded his own arms, mirroring my defensive stance. “You could have told Brodie or Ethan to retrieve them, rather than risk your own incarceration.”

“I was the only one home when the alarm activated,” I murmured, knowing full well that wasn’t a good enough reason. I shouldn’t leave Meadowridge. Not for anything. “Considering she’s your debt, Drew, I’d think you’d be saying thank you right now.”

Andrew blew out a heavy sigh, running a hand through his perfect hair and messing it up which was a clear sign that he wasn’t okay. “Yeah. Right. Thanks, bro. I never anticipated that keeping an eye on some normal chick would be so…stressful.”

That amused me enough to crack a smile. “She’s not some normal chick, that’s why. Even if she doesn’t know it, she’s still Abraham’s daughter.”

Andrew grimaced, nodding. “You’re right. I just don’t know how long he’s expecting me to keep this up. The girl is a danger magnet.” She was, but I kind of liked that about her. She was a little bit spicy and intrigued the shit out of me. “Did you hear there was an attempted break in at the south gate while you were gone? Some dickheads from the Crusades trying to get onto school grounds.”

I hadn’t. I’d been too occupied with having Eve’s hands on my jacket for the whole drive back, I simply hadn’t checked my messages. “I take it they were stopped?”

Andrew scoffed, rolling his shirtsleeves in a clear sign of his anxiety. “Of course they were. The Meadowridge security is better than my mother’s own Secret Service. It is uncomfortable timing, though. Abraham asked me to keep Evelyn safe for a reason…he must think she’s in danger.”

I quirked a brow. “More than getting shot in the back at her last school? I’d think that was reason enough to be worried.”

“True,” he agreed with a scowl. “I dunno. She just gets under my skin.”

Now that was a feeling I could identify with. She also got under mine, though I was confident it was in an entirely different way.

A muffled scream from upstairs echoed through the house, and before I could even comprehend what I was doing, I’d taken the stairs three at a time. Brodie beat me there and held up a hand to tell me to calm the fuck down.

“She’s asleep,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Nightmares. What happened out there with Connor?”

I shrugged. “Fuck if I know. Call him and ask.” Another muffled scream came through the door, and I jerked forward, reaching for the handle.

“It’s locked,” Brodie informed me—unnecessarily, since it didn’t turn more than a couple of millimeters. “She always locks it when she’s pissed off.”

Scowling, I refrained from telling him that I had a spare key that I could use if I wanted to. But if I did, I’d lose that safety net. Instead, I knocked gently on Eve’s door. “Eve? It’s Haze. Can we talk?”

No response.

Brodie gave a heavy sigh, sliding his back down the wall until his butt met the floor. “She’s asleep, bro. Though I’m tempted to kick the door down, because I’m not sure how much longer I can listen to her sobs without losing my mind.”

To reiterate his words, sobs echoed through the door, and now I was the one considering whether I was willing to kick it down. “It’ll make it worse,” I told him, aware that startling her awake in the middle of a terror could do further psychological damage. “She’s already afraid of being attacked, and us breaking her door down is quite violent.”

“If she wanted company, she wouldn’t have locked the door,” Andrew called in a hard voice, glaring at the both of us. “Haze, call Con and get more info about what the fuck went down out there. We can’t do shit if we don’t know what happened to her.”

He had a good point. I flipped him my middle finger but left Brodie sitting guard outside Eve’s room as I returned to my own. Connor had been heading to his family estate to visit his father, so I wasn’t going to risk calling him. Instead, I sent an encrypted message to his smartwatch, telling him to call when it was safe.

I didn’t wait long before my phone lit up, and I accepted the unknown caller.

“All good?” I asked carefully.

“Yeah, I’m on my way back to the house,” he replied in a tired voice. “Is she okay?”

There was no need to ask which she he was asking about, but I was surprised to hear his concern. He’d shown nothing but irritation and distrust for pretty little Eve and, for the past week, had practically ignored her existence entirely. And yet, there was undeniable vulnerability in that simple question.

“She’s alive,” I replied carefully. “You gonna give me the whole story?”

Connor gave a huffing groan. “Not that much to tell, Haze. I went out to warn Elijah and his dipshit thugs to stay the fuck out of Meadowridge. She fucking followed me like some sort of obsessed stalker, then screamed when one of the Crusades were about to put a bullet through my side. Fucking idiot.” He was gruff, but there was no heat in his words. What the hell had actually happened out there between them?

“So…she saved you from getting shot. How’d you end up across state lines in the middle of a fucking forest?” Because Connor wasn’t the type to willingly get kidnapped. Ever. He’d have rather been shot.

“Fucking reckless brat was about to be taken at gunpoint, so I volunteered to go along for the ride. Then dealt with the driver when he stopped to dump us in the forest. Then she freaked right the fuck out about one tiny little gunshot and went into shock so that’s when I hit the alert to link up with you.” Connor sounded cagey, like he was leaving out some of the finer details. Not that it really mattered. “Otherwise, I would have just brought her home myself and not bothered you.”

I drummed my fingers on the edge of my desk, cycling through our security cameras and locating the timestamp for when he’d left the house, then found the frame showing Eve following. Sneaky little panther, she blended beautifully with the shadows. Maybe she’d be good for espionage one day.

“Crusades,” I said, clicking through more cameras at dizzying speed. I wanted to see the attempt on the South gate that Andrew mentioned. “Anything to do with a failed break-in here at school?”

Connor grunted. “Yeah. They had a kidnap-ransom job that they must have been paid big bucks for.”

I found the footage in question and watched it through, silent, inspecting every inch of the scene, then swapped to a different camera angle to do the same. Connor waited, not breaking my train of thought, until I was satisfied.

“They will be hurting after today. Between you and the gate security, they lost a few bodies.” I closed the campus video feeds and switched to our house account—to one camera feed in particular.

Eve’s bedroom.

She tossed and turned in her bed, sheets tangling her legs, but didn’t appear to be screaming and crying anymore. That was comforting. If it’d gone on much longer, I would have had to distract Brodie long enough to use my key and…

And then what? I couldn’t exactly comfort her like Ethan had last week, though the fantasy of it played out in technicolor within my mind.

“I should be back in a couple of hours,” Connor said, breaking through my suddenly pornographic thoughts. “Maybe tell Evelyn to book a session with the school psychiatrist or something. She can’t keep falling to pieces at the sight of guns, not in our or her father’s world anyway.”

Shit, he was right about that. “Will do,” I muttered. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, make sure she eats something. She must be starving and she vomited up what little she’d eaten for dinner last night.” Connor—of all fucking people, Connor Sullivan—actually sounded like he cared. Then I grinned.

“She vomited? Eth and Brodes both kissed her when we got back.” I said it like I wouldn’t have if I were in their shoes. I would’ve.

A heavy silence filled the phone line for a minute, then Connor made a strangled noise. “Excuse me? Brodie did what?”

I rolled my eyes. “As if you’re shocked. I’ll go sort out some dinner in case Eve wakes up.”

Another grunt from Connor. “She likes pasta.”

My brows shot up. “I’m aware.” I just didn’t realize he’d been paying attention to anything Eve liked. I ended the call without offering any further conversation. I’d already reached my max capacity for small talk and gossip and, frankly, my head hurt.

I sat there for a few minutes, watching Eve sleeping on my huge computer monitor. If she ever found out I’d placed a camera in her room…if anyone found out…I’d be toast. Worse if they found out about the one in the shower. That feed was my favorite, for totally perverse reasons.

The way I figured, I could never actually touch her. My trauma wouldn’t let me. So where was the harm in spying?

Deciding she was still fast asleep, if still in the grips of a nightmare, I closed my browsers and headed downstairs to cook. Maybe she’d wake up if she smelled dinner on the stove, since she’d cooked every night of the past week.

At no point did I stop and ask myself why I cared. It was simple: she intrigued me, and she fit. With the house, with my found family, and oh so perfectly on the back of my bike. Andrew might think this was a short-term assignment, but I knew better. She was ours now. For good.