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“Do you need something?”
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “You.”
She couldn’t have heard that right. All the adrenaline and crackling of her nerves had her brain misfiring. “What did you just say?”
“Nothing.”
The mattress dipped from his weight and her body slid into his. “I can’t seem to calm my nerves. I feel like I’m six seconds from flying apart.”
His palm slipped over her thigh. “It’s aftermath.”
“Do you always feel like this?”
“Just sometimes.” He slid his hand over hers and their fingers entwined. “Your nerve endings are on fire. The danger and fear, the sadness and pain. It’s all mixing and getting jammed up inside you.”
“How do I get rid of it?”
“Different things work for different people.” His thumb rubbed against the back of her hand. Slow, lazy circles that soothed her even as her insides continued to churn.
Bold had worked for her once before. She tried it again. “Any chance kissing does the trick?”
Sheltered
HelenKay Dimon
HELENKAY DIMON, an award-winning author, spent twelve years in the most unromantic career ever—divorce lawyer. After dedicating all that effort to helping people terminate relationships, she is thrilled to deal in happy endings and write romance novels for a living. Now her days are filled with gardening, writing, reading and spending time with her family in and around San Diego. Stop by her website, www.helenkaydimon.com, and say hello.
Thank you to my husband, James, for the trip to Oregon. All that beautiful open space gave me tons of suspense ideas.
Contents
For the third night in a row the wind and rain whipped up the Oregon Coast and smacked into the side of Lindsey Pike’s small cottage. The temps dipped into lower than normal range for late summer, but that was only part of the reason for keeping her windows closed. The other sat about eleven miles away, up a steep hill and behind a locked gate.
But cool temperature or not, a steady banging put her already zapping nerves further on edge. The rattle came first, then the thud. That would teach her to wait on fixing the shutter in the family room until “sometime next week.”
She leaned back into the stack of pillows piled behind her on her bed and reopened her book. After she stared at the same line for what felt like the billionth time, she decided maybe this wasn’t the right night for dry research reading. She slipped her legs over the side of the bed and winced when her bare toes hit the chilled hardwood floor.
She made it two steps down the hallway in search of the perfect mindless magazine before she stilled. Something was off. In the air, in
