Cuff Me(55)

She wanted her opposite.

She wanted Vin.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR


Traveling with another person could cause turmoil in the most stable of relationships.

And Vincent and Jill were anything but stable.

Still, Jill was looking forward to their California trip. Maybe the new environment was the change she needed to clear her head.

Jill drained the last of her coffee, washed the cup, and dried it. For the first time ever, she wasn’t the one rushing around, and the extra time felt decadent.

Vincent had texted her earlier saying that he was running late. Not really his thing, but the guy was allowed to oversleep now and then. God knew she’d done it a handful of times.

When he pulled up outside her apartment, she was ready, wheeling her bag down the drive.

“Morning!” she said as he came around the back of the car and practically threw her bag in the trunk.

He grunted.

Jill sighed. “Have you had your coffee yet?”

“Yes, I’ve had my coffee,” he snapped.

“Okay, so the bad mood is just…”

He slammed the trunk and returned to his side of the car without responding.

“Well, this should be fun,” Jill muttered as she got into the passenger seat.

There were several tense moments of silence before Jill turned to face him. “I thought we were done with this.”

“Done with what?”

“The silent treatment.”

“I’m not being silent,” he snapped.

“You’re also not using more than, like, five words in a sentence.”

“Never bothered you before.”

Well, it bothers me now! she wanted to scream. It bothers me now because I need to tell you something important.

Like the fact that I ended my engagement, and…

He crossed the console and flipped on the radio. Loudly.

Guess they were done talking.

Maybe he’d just woken up on the wrong side of the bed, but she was getting tired of this.

They’d been making slow progress toward getting back to their normal selves since the sort-of fight after the disastrous Holly Adams interrogation, but now it felt like they were back to square one: Lying to each other.

Jill glanced down at her left hand. The ring felt like a mockery now. It was a mockery. She was no longer engaged.

For a moment, she dreamed about tugging it off. Chucking it out the window and telling Vincent the truth. The whole truth.

Instead, she pressed her lips together and looked out the window.

She let him have his silence. Hell, she wanted it. Maybe the big grouch was finally starting to rub off on her after all these years.

Vincent’s bad mood persisted all the way to the airport.

All the way through the security line.

Continued even when she waited in a ridiculously long Starbucks queue to fetch him a coffee.

By the time she was buckling her seat belt, Jill was starting to wonder if Anth had been completely wrong about Vin’s feelings for her. Because the man sitting beside her was hardly a man in love. Or even like.

She glanced over. He was a man who…

He was stiff as a board, his knuckles actually white where they clenched the armrests.

Concerned, she set her stuff on the still-vacant window seat to her right and put a hand on his arm. “Vin? You okay?”

He gave her a stiff nod, but his eyes never stopped darting around the plane.

“You are not,” she accused. “What’s going on? Did you see something?” she asked, subtly glancing around in case it was his cop instincts on high alert.

Another shake of his head, this time in the negative. Jill opened her mouth again, but he uttered a curt “Drop it.”

“Fine,” she snapped.

Jill put her headphones on and pulled out her e-reader to open the romance novel she’d been waiting for weeks to find time to read. Just let him dwell on whatever had crawled up his butt.

It wasn’t until the plane pulled away from the gate that Jill had the happy realization that in an almost unheard-of stroke of aviation luck, the window seat next to her had never been occupied.

Not that she minded the middle seat, but it was a long flight. A little space wouldn’t hurt, especially since her only company was a suddenly-grumpier-than-usual Vincent.

Jill glanced around to make sure the flight attendants wouldn’t gripe at her if she switched seats as they were doing their slow taxi, only to freeze when she saw Vincent’s face.

He wasn’t pissed. Wasn’t grumpy.

He was scared.

Oh. Oh!

Immediately, Jill tugged off her headphones, dropped her e-reader into the seat pocket in front of her, and tucked her arm into his.

He didn’t even glance down.

“Hey,” she whispered. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

No response.

“Vin.” She shook his arm. “You’re scared to fly? Is this why you were so grumpy all morning?”

“Shut up, Henley.”

She smiled then, careful to keep the smile gentle and not mocking.

The man was really, truly scared, and as someone with a not-so-minor spider phobia, she understood what it was like to be crippled by an irrational but unavoidable terror.

Jill forgot all about moving to the other seat, and instead let her fingers run along his forearm where it gripped the armrest like a lifeline.