Defiance (The Protectors #9)(32)

I barely managed to stifle a sob as I climbed to my feet. As I left the room, I had only one thought.

Escape. I just needed to fucking escape.

I began walking, not even caring where my feet were taking me or if Vincent followed.

He didn’t.

My feet bypassed the stairs that led to the second floor and took me right out the front door. I quickened my pace once I got outside and quickly spotted the gate Vincent had mentioned. Once I reached it, the watch unlocked it, as well as the next gate on the second fence. As soon as I reached the driveway that wound through the dense trees, I took the watch off and dropped it on the ground. I didn’t care that I didn’t have my phone. I didn’t care that no one knew where I was. I didn’t care about anything except keeping moving.

Anything to escape the man in the house behind me.

To escape those few moments last night where I’d finally been allowed to be the real me.

Where I hadn’t needed to be the perfect Nathan Wilder anymore.

I’d been Nate. His Nate.

Now…now I had no clue who I was. I didn’t know if I could go back to being the man I’d been. I didn’t know if I even wanted to.

I heard the roar of an engine coming up fast behind me, but I made no effort to escape it since I knew who it was. But it wasn’t Vincent’s car that flew past me and then rolled to a stop a half dozen feet in front of me.

I watched Vincent lean back on the motorcycle after turning it off. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, though I could see one dangling from one of the handles on the bike. I knew nothing about motorcycles, but I suspected whatever model it was, it was designed for one thing and one thing only.

Speed.

And Vincent looked perfectly at home sitting on it.

“Let’s go for a ride.”

Was he fucking kidding?

“No. You said I could leave whenever I wanted.”

“And you can,” he said. “I’m not here to stop you. When we get back, if you still want to leave, I’ll give you a ride wherever you want to go.”

Wherever I wanted to go.

Where the hell was I supposed to go? Back to my old life? Even if by some miracle I could get it back to where it had been before Vincent had stepped through my shattered window, was that even what I wanted?

Neither of us moved as we stared each other down. And then he did it. He held out his fucking hand.

His touch…it was like a goddamn magnet. I didn’t understand it.

But I was also too tired to fight it. There was no logic to what I was doing. Not in going with him. Not in continuing on my own. But I kept going back to that moment the night before when I’d wrapped my arms around him and finally felt safe…and free. Would it be so wrong to have a little more of that?

I stepped forward and put my right hand in his. His grip was gentle on my injured hand as he helped me settle on the back of the bike. He reached behind my left thigh and pulled a helmet free from some kind of clip and handed it to me. I worked it over my head, mindful of my hand, and waited until he put his own helmet on. Then he was reaching behind him to grab my arms and wrap them around his waist. Logically, I’d known I’d probably have to hang onto him like this, but actually doing it was causing a maelstrom of emotions to go through me. I wanted to both jump off the bike and lean into him at the same time. I settled for in between and held myself stiff as I gripped his hips. But as soon as the bike got moving and picked up speed, I knew it wasn’t going to work, and I gave up and leaned against Vincent’s back. I tried to tell myself it was purely for safety purposes, but I was tired of lying to myself. There would be plenty of time for that later.

The ride took about an hour, and by the time we reached our destination, I found that I didn’t really care anymore where we were going. It wasn’t until Vincent turned off the bike and rubbed his hand over where mine were joined together on his abdomen that I snapped out of my daze and straightened. I’d been admiring the view during the entire drive and hadn’t realized at first that we were going higher up in elevation until we’d gotten out of a particularly heavy section of forest and I’d seen the valley below us. The place Vincent had stopped was an overlook of some kind. I climbed off the bike and set my helmet on the seat after Vincent dismounted.

I watched Vincent loop his helmet over one of the handlebars of the bike, and then he was moving towards several large rocks that were just a few feet from the edge of the overlook. There were no other people around, so I didn’t have to worry about being recognized. I followed Vincent, but when he leaned against the rocks and just studied our surroundings, I held back. It would have been easy to move to his side and pretend we were there for different reasons than we were.

“The bike belonged to my boyfriend,” he said as he glanced at me and then looked at the bike. “One of his favorite things to do was come up to these mountains when we were on leave.”

“You were in the military?” I asked, despite my promise to myself to let him do the talking.

He nodded. “I enlisted first. David joined up a year later when he graduated high school.”

“You were together in high school?”

“We grew up together. Both military brats. Our parents were friends. There were a few times our fathers were stationed at different bases, but by the time we were fifteen, they were both working for the Department of Defense, so we lived in Virginia. Went to the same high school. It was the most natural thing for us to end up together.”