Page 48 of Breaking His Exile

“If the Sins are outside the ranch, it’s not safe to send anything, even Morse code. They’ll be listening to all of the transmissions, same as us.”

Her shoulders slumped.

“We’ll think of something else,” he promised.

After a beat, she nodded, drew a breath and took his hand.

They descended. The trail down ran steeper than the one they’d climbed, loose rock underfoot and the wind rising with every minute.

Rainey moved carefully, testing each foothold, and Evander stayed behind her, close enough to catch her if she went down.

She didn’t.

The shelter showed through the trees— a shallow overhang, maybe eight feet wide and four deep. It wouldn’t stop a determined rain, but it would break the worst of it. Evander ducked under the lip as the first drops came, fat and cold, spattering the stone around them.

Tilly followed and shook the water from her coat in a spray that caught Evander full in the face.

“Tilly,” he growled.

Rainey laughed. “She is unrepentant.”

He looked down at his dog as she settled belly to stone, back legs kicked out like a frog’s. “She’s shameless,” he said, but the word came out rough, almost fond, and he crouched to run a hand down her wet back. She leaned into the touch, her tail thumping once against the stone.

The rain came on fast. Within minutes it sheeted across the ridge in gray curtains, drumming the rock above them, running off the overhang’s lip in ropes. The temperature dropped with it.

Evander shrugged off his pack, pulled the radio out, checked it for moisture. Dry. Good. He set it on the stone between them and sat back against the rock wall, knees drawn up.

Rainey sat beside him, close enough that their boots nearly touched. She’d pulled the jacket collar up around her ears, and her hair had gone dark with rain. She looked so damn small in his jacket. Smaller than she was.

He didn’t like it.

He needed her larger than life, because the thought of her small and breakable twisted something in his chest he didn’t have a name for and didn’t want one.

The sleeves rode up, and he caught sight of her burn scars.

Last night he’d been too wrapped up in his own shit to comprehend what they really meant.

Her father had used her as his personal ashtray.

The ugly thing in him stirred. He wanted to find that fucker and put a whole pack of cigarettes out on his skin— to start. He dug his nails into his palms, focused on the bite of it, and forced the thing back down.

When he trusted himself to speak without grinding his teeth, he said, “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”

She looked at the scars before pulling the sleeve down over them. “No abused kid does. He did worse to River.” She sighed and looked west again. “I shouldn’t blame Riv for getting out the second he could. But I do.”

Evander didn’t know what to say to that. He wasn’t built for comfort or soft words, and there was nothing to do about it.

But she didn’t seem to need comforting words. She sat quiet a while, arms crossed over her knees, then turned her head and looked at him with those clear, direct eyes. “Can we talk about last night?”

Fuck, no.

It took him a second to find his voice. “Rather not.”

“I just have one more thing to say. You don’t get to kiss me and then punish yourself for it.”

His chest cinched down until pulling in air went hard. “It wasn’t about the kiss.”

“Oh, you are so full of shit, Evander. You hurt yourself because you let yourself want something.” She held his eyes. “And then you decided wanting it made you dangerous. That’s not about Afghanistan or what happened at Valor Ridge. That’s all about me, and the fact that for ten seconds in that cabin you forgot to be afraid of yourself, and you couldn’t stand it.”