Page 56 of Brown Sugar
My anxiety begins to recede as I let him.
I can finally let my guard down after a day spent thrown into another unpredictable situation.
The door snaps shut behind us, and I realize we’re in our own impenetrable fortress. Sighing, my shoulders slump, losing the weight they’ve been carrying.
“Make yourself at home,” he says. His thumb rubs a soft back-and-forth pattern across the curve of my elbow. “I’m going to get you an icepack for that bump on your head.”
I carefully toe out of my sneakers as Tyson’s large form retreats down the hall. I’m slow exploring on my own, wandering from the foyer area to the rest of the ground floor. The house is spacious. Clean but empty.
Tyson keeps few personal possessions.
No photographs. No knickknacks. No real color scheme other than black and slate gray.
I find myself in the living room where his long sectional sofa curls around the room and glass doors preview the surrounding trees.
When I landed at LAX and gave the airport taxi the address—info I had taken from the terminated contract he signed—the driver told me he had no clue where the place was. The result was that we got lost twice on our way here.
Tyson bought just about the most reclusive home he could, miles outside of LA.
Now that I’m inside, I realize it fits him in a lot of ways. A home full of wide windows far removed from the city where he can have a vantage point to watch the world from afar.
“Here,” he says when he returns. His warm palm cups the tip of my shoulder in the same fashion he’d done my elbow, easing me toward the sofa cushions. He crouches beside me as I sit down and then applies the cold compress he’s grabbed.
My eyes close at how good it feels. Even better than the one they’d used at the ER.
“How’d you get here?” he asks.
“Hmmm?”
“You said you were in New York City.”
“Oh,” I mutter. “I escaped the hospital and went to the airport.”
“Kiana…” he sighs with a shake of his head. His thick fingers are gentle as he smooths curls away from my hairline and holds the cold compress to the bump. “You shouldn’t have flown across the country like that.”
I swallow against the tide of emotions threatening to erupt. They’ve been locked inside me from the moment Tyson and I separated in London. It might’ve been a risky choice to make in the wake of everything that’s happened, but Ineededto get away.
I couldn’t stay another second in Tommy’s clutches.
As if sensing these are my thoughts, he draws back enough to peer into my eyes. His palms slide across the curve of my cheeks as he takes my face into his hands.
“You can come by anytime,” he says. “It’s not that I don’t want you here. It’s that I don’t want you exposed when the threat’s out there. Tell me about the crash. Everything you know.”
I exhaust myself recounting the details.
Tyson listens patiently, tending to my bumps and bruises as best he can. But what makes the difference is the soothing warmth of his touch. Though reliving the car crash takes a lot out of me, Tyson replenishes what’s lost.
He massages the aches and pains in my neck and shoulders. He kisses and caresses the parts of me that feel fractured. I find myself wrapping my arms around his wide frame and snuggling my face into any nook I can find. He holds me tight to him ’til I feel myself drifting off.
My eyelids grow heavy, and my breathing slows.
“It’s okay, princess,” he says. “Time to take it easy. Nobody’s got to know you’re here.”
Comforting words I need to hear at a time like this.
Before I can even think about objecting, I’m drifting off to sleep in his arms. I’m fading into a black well that’s dreamless but peaceful.
It’s evening when I wake up in Tyson’s bed. I’m slow reacting, tucked into the thick folds of the comforter. I don’t even remember making it up to his room let alone falling asleep in his bed. I sit up, spotting the dusk-smattered sky through the giant windows.