Darkest Before Dawn

They only questioned her. And she knew it wasn’t that they didn’t believe in her—they did. They loved her. She never doubted that for a moment. They just didn’t understand her. Didn’t understand why her calling took her so far from the people who loved her when all her other siblings’ paths had kept them close to home.

How could she explain the restless drive to make a difference in places that seldom received anything at all except death and violence? Brad should understand her better than anyone. He was a protector. The sheriff. He was responsible for a lot of lives. He was perhaps the only sibling she believed she had a kinship with. A shared burden. Surely their need to protect and save others had to come from somewhere.

“Honor, are you in pain?”

Hancock’s low voice, laced with concern, drifted through her melancholy and brought her gaze to his; she saw him intently studying her face as though he were privy to her every thought.

She sucked in her breath and impulsively slid her fingers through his where they rested on the edge of the bed at her side and linked them together with a gentle tug. He flinched as though he’d received an electric shock, but he didn’t remove his hand or pry hers away, a fact she was grateful for.

For this one brief moment, she needed the touch of another. Comfort. The promise of soon being held and surrounded by the love and support of her family. Every minute she was away was the worst sort of hell for them all. They likely thought she was dead, and if they were not certain of her death, then worse, they feared what her fate was. What she was enduring even now.

She prayed they thought she was dead until she could prove to them she wasn’t. It was kinder than them torturing themselves with the endless possibilities of what could be happening to her. Besides, that wasn’t going to happen. Hancock had her. He wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.

It was foolish to think of anyone being invincible, impervious to the reach of A New Era, but she absolutely believed that Hancock could and would destroy anything in his path and would never let harm come to her. She knew it as surely as the sun rose in the east and slid into sleep in the west.

“What’s wrong, Honor?” Hancock demanded bluntly, his eyes narrowing further as he searched her face for any sign of what was causing her distress.

She wasn’t distressed.

She needed.

Heat crept up her neck and into her cheeks and she could only pray that the remnants of the dye as well as being in the sun for so long prevented him from seeing the evidence of the guilty blush.

She licked her dry, cracked lips and hesitantly, shyly, looked up at him from beneath lowered lashes.

“Kiss me, Hancock,” she said in a quivery voice that could be construed as fearful. But she knew better. And judging by the look on Hancock’s face, he also knew she wasn’t afraid of him. Or of what she was asking.

His eyes flashed with uncertainty, a rarity for him. She knew that without questioning how. She just knew. But there was also a spark of something else altogether.

Answering need. Want. Desire.

It was gone almost before she registered it happening, but the eyes never lied. They were the door to a person’s soul, or so the poets always said.

And just as she knew that Hancock was rarely if ever uncertain about anything, she also knew that it was even more rare for him to allow anyone to see what she’d just witnessed in his eyes.

She’d gotten to him and she knew it. Was stunned by it.

Good God, was she happy about it? What the hell was wrong with her? She didn’t know this man and it was presumptuous on her part, not to mention arrogant, to think that she could discern anything about him when others certainly couldn’t.

But she was already headed down a hazardous path that gave her a euphoric rush. Alive. She felt alive. Gloriously alive when death had been a suffocating fog surrounding her at every turn.

She’d made it free. Hancock had delivered what he’d promised. Her freedom from the horrible men hunting her like ruthless predators.

“Kiss me,” she said again, her voice dropping to a husky whisper laced with need. “Just one time when we’re both perfectly aware of it happening and neither of us can claim it never happened.”

His eyes widened in quick alarm and then surprise. Both reactions were chased from his eyes as they hardened with the realization that she knew. She remembered. Perhaps she’d never forgotten at all but needed time for all the pieces to drift back together. Now that she had them all in place, she would lock that memory into her soul for all time. Savor it. One pure, sweet moment amid so much fear and chaos and torment.

He swore softly, but even as he did so he slid one knee onto the mattress and leaned his big, tightly muscled body toward hers until he hovered mere inches above her. Heat licked from his skin, warming her to the bone. She suddenly took in the huge disparity in their sizes. He was a mountain of solid steel, not a spare ounce of flesh anywhere on his body that she could discern. And she had a very vivid imagination.

But he made her feel small and fragile. Vulnerable. But not afraid. She licked her lips, suddenly realizing that perhaps she should be afraid, provoking the beast when she was completely aware and had all her senses about her. Or maybe not enough sense to resist poking the wild animal.

With a harsh groan when her tongue darted over her bottom lip, he leaned down and swept her mouth into his, hot and hungry. There was none of the almost delicate tenderness he’d maintained when he’d kissed her so reverently when he thought she was unaware of her actions or that he was kissing her.

He devoured her mouth, consumed her, tasted every part of her hungry tongue, showing her the staggering difference between a male trying to offer a woman comfort and a starving man demonstrating his ruthless dominance over her.