Chapter 8 - The Weight of an Exhausted Body
Danny looked down.
His finger froze on the trigger shoe.
Lying on the mattress directly beside him, half-curled on her side with her cheek pillowed against his right bicep, was Emma Carter.
She was still wearing the black-and-white maid uniform. The cheap cotton dress was wrinkled, the white apron twisted around her waist, her flat work shoes discarded somewhere on the floor near the foot of the bed. Her chestnut hair had completely spilled from its pins, spreading across the white silk sheets in soft, dark waves that brushed against his bare shoulder.
One of her slender, bare arms—the skin pale and marked with the dry, cracked lines of chemical burns—lay resting across the center of his heavily tattooed chest.
Her small hand was relaxed, her fingers curled loosely over the jagged scar above his heart, rising and falling in perfect, slow synchronization with his own breathing.
She was not an assassin. She was not holding a ceramic blade, a garrote, or an untraceable syringe of potassium chloride.
She was dead asleep.
Her face, unburdened by the defensive, stubborn armor she had worn in the hallway, looked astonishingly young. The sharp lines of tension around her eyes had smoothed into peaceful stillness; her lips were parted slightly, releasing soft, warm puffs of air that brushed against the curve of his collarbone.
She had not climbed into his bed out of seduction, affection, or calculation.
She had collapsed.
Danny stared down at her, his heart hammering against the inside of his ribs with a violence that had nothing to do with phantom nerve pain.
He could trace the path of her collapse in his mind: she had finished scrubbing the baseboards in the hallway, brought him the medication, cleaned the shattered glass, and then walked into the master bedroom to turn down the sheets and replace the towels. The sixty-eight-degree warmth of the room, the sixteen hours on her feet, the two hours of sleep she had been surviving on for weeks—it had all caught up to her at once. She had sat on the edge of the mattress to rest her aching spine for thirty seconds, her eyes had closed, and her body had simply surrendered to gravity.
She was an exhausted child who had dropped where she stood.
Slowly, deliberately, Danny’s finger slipped out of the trigger guard.
His hand withdrew from beneath the pillow, sliding the Kimber .45 back into its concealed pocket between the mattress and the frame, engaging the manual safety with a quiet click.
He looked down at her arm resting across his bare chest.
For two years, no living soul had touched Danny Marcone without an agenda. His doctors touched him with latex gloves and clinical detachment. His lieutenants touched his hand with performative reverence when swearing loyalty. His enemies touched him with lead and steel.
No one had simply laid their hand against his heart and slept.
The warmth of her skin was searing against his cold, scarred chest. He could feel the delicate flutter of her pulse against his pectoral muscle—a tiny, fragile rhythm that seemed impossibly loud in the vast, shadowed silence of his luxury fortress.
May you like
He didn't shove her away. He didn't shout for Marcus.
He lay there in the dark, shirtless and immovable, feeling the slow, rhythmic weight of a woman who had refused him two pills, wondering why the hell he didn't want to wake her.
