Five Days Grace Read Online Free Page B

here when? Aidan shifted his weight so he was still on top of her, but not pushing her into the floor. "I've been here for almost three weeks. Zach told me the place was empty, that I was welcome to use it as long as I want. He said no one wanted to be here when it's this cold."
    "Zach? Really?"
    "Yes, really."
    "Prove it." She was being still at least, and she wasn't screaming. "Call him. I want to hear the conversation, so put your phone on speaker."
    She was giving orders? Did she not understand she was pinned to the floor, and he was calling the shots? Plus, she was dead wrong about one thing, which had him doubting her whole story.
    "Cell reception here sucks on a good day," he said. "Which I suspect you'd know if you'd been here before. In this storm, it's probably impossible to get a signal anywhere on the lake. And there's no land-line."
    "Okay, yeah. I remember that now. It's been a while since I was here."
    "And if it does really belong to your family, what's with you tossing the place? You steal from your own family?"
    "No! And even if I did, there's nothing here to steal. I was looking for something. Not to steal. Just... There's something I need to find, and I think it might be here. Could you get off me, please?"
    Aidan thought about it. His shoulder ached. So did his side and his hip. He wasn't going to be able to move off her quickly or easily, so if she threw another elbow at him—or worse, a knee, a foot—it was going to hurt.
    He pressed the gun between her shoulder blades, just to the left of her spine. "Feel that, Princess?"
    "What? You sitting on me and trying to break my arm?"
    He pressed the barrel more firmly into her skin.
    "Oh, my God! Do you have a gun?"
    "Hell, yes, I have a gun," he said.
    And if she'd spent any serious time in trouble before, wouldn't she have realized that when he'd first grabbed her? But maybe she wasn't the kind of girl who'd been in serious trouble before. Maybe she'd been too startled to pick up on exactly what was going on, like the fact that she had a gun at her back.
    "Okay... Just... What do you want from me?"
    Her voice trembled, and if he wasn't mistaken, she was crying.
    He ran his hands over her as quickly and matter-of-factly as he could, pushing to the back of his mind the knowledge that it had been a long time since he'd touched anyone with curves like these. She was petite and—he sincerely hoped, so he didn't feel like such a letch—at least over the age of twenty-one. She tensed, whimpered, but stayed still and quiet.
    "Good, you're not armed."
    "Of course, I'm not armed. I'm not a criminal. I just didn't know Zach had loaned someone the cabin. Please, don't hurt me."
    "But you didn't ask before you came up here? Why is that?"
    "Because I didn't want anyone to know I was here."
    Aidan laughed, couldn't help it. "Princess, you're just digging yourself in deeper. Why didn't you want anyone to know you were going to be here?"
    "Because... Just... Because I didn't."
    "You're going to have to do better than that," he insisted.
    "Do you have a family?" she asked.
    "Yes."
    "Are you close?"
    How to answer that? "Close enough."
    "Do they worry about you? Do you know what it's like to have all of them worried about you?"
    "Yes." Did he ever. He'd kicked them out of his hospital room and the rehab facility more than once.
    "Having them watch you all the time, trying to figure out how you're doing, if they should be even more worried than they already are. I mean... I love them, really I do. I'm just not used to being the one they worry about. And it's exhausting, trying to convince them not to worry so much. I just didn't have the energy to do it anymore, and... This was a totally impulsive move. I was heading north on I-75, saw the exit and decided to go. Didn't tell a soul where I was going."
    "Okay, I gotta tell you, if there was a test about what not to tell the man holding a gun on you, you'd have flunked right there, Princess."
    She practically growled, then