The McClane Apocalypse Book Five (52 page)

“Other than the ten years it took off my
life,” Paige says, causing him to laugh.

Paige reaches across the table and lays her
hand on top of his. What she doesn’t expect is her reaction to
touching him. His skin is so warm under her cold fingertips. His
dark eyes dart to hers.

“Thanks again,” she says softly.

Cory gives her a nod. Then, in an unexpected
turn, he flips over his hand and captures hers within his own.
Paige’s gaze falls to their hands as he begins to stroke her
fingers lightly. Then he runs his index finger over the black
strings tied on her wrist. His hand is rough and calloused. She has
long, thin fingers, but his wrist looks as thick as her calf
muscle. His movements send a shiver up her arm. He abruptly pulls
his hand away as if he found the contact unpleasant.

“No problem, beanpole,” he says with a dark
scowl and returns to his food.

Paige narrows her eyes at the top of his
downturned head suspiciously.

After a few minutes, Cory asks, “Were you
close with him?”

“Who?”
“Your old man. Did you get along?”

“Oh, yes, we were very close. He taught
me to have an appreciation for things, not to take anything for
granted. Of course, I did take everything for granted. I didn’t
think so at the time. But now that I spend most of my
time
thinking about where my next meal
is coming from or if I’ll have enough water to drink or back when
feeding Maddie was the first priority for the day or how we’d give
her a bath, I realize how much I took everything for
granted.”

“Yeah, well none of us knew it was all gonna
end. That’s not your fault,” Cory tells her bluntly. “You’ve got
Simon again, so that’s good.”

“Yes, it is,” Paige says. “I just felt like
this huge weight was lifted off my shoulders when I found him, like
I had a reason to keep going. There were a lot of dark days for me
out there on the road. Many times I wasn’t sure it was worth
keeping going.”

“Well, he’s sure as shit never gonna let you
out of his sights now,” Cory says with a grunt.

“No kidding!” Paige says
with
a laugh. “Good grief. He’s the
little brother. I’m the big sister. I’m older, but he acts like
he’s my new guardian.”

“That’s ok. Everyone needs someone to
look after them,” Cory tells her as he
ties
his shaggy hair into a short ponytail and
secures it with a
rubber-band
from his pocket.

“Who’s looking after you?” she asks in a more
serious tone.

“My weapon,” he says
with
a cocky smirk.

Paige isn’t sure he means his gun. He has a
very mischievous grin on his mouth.

“I’ll watch your back,” she volunteers, the
words leaving her mouth before she can even think about them.

One dark eyebrow rises sardonically before he
says, “You? All hundred pounds of ya’? You couldn’t even defeat a
hole in the floor.”

Paige
purses
her mouth at him indignantly.

“Hey,” she pouts softly.

Cory chuckles at her and winks. “You’re
fine. You don’t need to save me. I’m beyond saving
anyways
.”

His tone has become somber, as if he isn’t
worth saving, and this bothers Paige more than she wants to
consider. Every single person at the farm would highly disagree. So
would she. Paige tries to convince herself that her concern for him
is because every person in the McClane family is worth saving, but
it isn’t quite working. Her concern for Cory seems to be coming
from somewhere less superficial than that line of reasoning.

“Were you close with your dad?”
Paige
inquires
, changing the
subject. She has an unusual curiosity to know more about him all of
a sudden. She hasn’t wanted to know anything about him so far in
their brief acquaintance. Mostly she’s tried to avoid him when
possible because of their first fateful meeting and, lately, for
other reasons.

“Sure. He was cool. We used to work on old
cars together, restoring them and droppin’ motors, that kind of
thing.”

“That’s cool,” Paige says, although she
really isn’t sure what he means about motors.

“We’d go hunting and fishing with Kelly when
he came home on leave. Kelly’s only my half-brother. I don’t know
if you knew that or not. His mom wasn’t our mom.”

“Yeah, I think I knew that,” Paige
admits. “What about your mother? Were you close
with
her, as well?”

“Yeah, she was great. She worked a lot,
so that kind of sucked. But she was always doing stuff for us. She
always talked about Kelly like he was her son, not her step-son.
She never thought of him as anything less. But Em was
closest
with
her,” Cory discloses
and then clams up.

The corner of his mouth twitches when he
mentions his dead, younger sister.

“Were you close
with
her, with Em?” Paige asks, although she
already knows the answer. Perhaps he wants to talk
with
someone about her. Sometimes when a
person loses someone close to them, people tend to skirt around the
topic because of their own discomfort. She wants to open the lines
of communication with him. If he wants someone to talk to, she’d
like to be that person. And this thought concerns Paige that she
would think of him in such a way.

Cory opens his mouth to say something, closes
it again, swallows and then says, “Yeah.”

“I saw a picture of her. She was very
pretty,” Paige offers kindly with a smile. Emma was a promising
young beauty. She knows how much everyone in the McClane family
loved and cherished her. She’s felt their devastation of losing
her, too. She understands their heartbreak. No fifteen-year-old kid
deserves to be killed so violently before they even reach
adulthood.

“Yeah,” he answers again noncommittally.

His eyes dart around on the hardwood floor.
This is not going to be the night he talks with her about his dead
sister. He’s highly uncomfortable.

“Sorry,” Paige
says softly
.

Cory starts packing away his empty containers
and leftover food. His chair scrapes against the floor as he
stands. Paige follows suit and meets him at the center of the
table. Her shoulder bumps against his arm as she reaches for the
package of bread.

“Excuse me,” she mumbles.

He doesn’t say anything, and he’s
stopped packing things away. Cory is
simply
standing beside her stock still. When she
glances up at him, he’s looking down at her with a solemn
expression on his face. Her breath hitches in her chest at the
intensity in his eyes. A
muscle
flexes in his strong jaw.

“She was the best of all of us,” he remarks
tightly and turns his gaze to his feet.

His words bring tears to her eyes. He
must feel such an incredible amount of guilt over losing her. His
torment is etched all over his handsome face. A black strand of
damp hair falls across his face. Paige pushes it back behind his
ear. His head is hung with what she believes is
shame
. This is definitely not how he usually acts.
There is this thick, concrete wall around him most of the time.
Sure, he’s a smartass and likes to razz her, but he’s never hard
and cynical. She’s seen the violent killer in him. She’s seen him
joking with the guys at the farm, but she’s never seen him like
this. He is hiding a mountain of grief behind that broad
chest.

“Cory,” Paige whispers hoarsely.

She turns toward him, allowing her fingers to
slide down the length of his arm to his hand. She gives it a gentle
squeeze. Paige watches his eyes move slowly from their intertwined
fingers all the way back up to her eyes. Then his eyes trail back
down and fall on the bare skin above her cleavage. He pauses there
a moment as her mouth parts. She takes a step toward him.

“We should get this cleaned up,” he says as
he shakes his head. “I need to do a quick patrol. Then we should
get some sleep.”

The spell broken, Paige steps back, drops his
hand and nods up at him.

“Right, yes, we should,” she stammers
with embarrassment. She’d misread his eyes. She thought she saw
desire there, but apparently she was wrong. Besides, she’s not the
kind of girl men want to be with. She’s the
type
of girl men just want to stick on their arm
and then go screw around with the busty blonde. For some reason,
being rejected by Cory stings just a little bit more than anyone
else. It comes from the same place as her need to save him, even if
it just means saving him from himself.

“Why don’t you just let me do the clean-up?”
she offers and turns back to the table quickly. “Unless you need my
help doing a patrol or whatever it was.”

“No, I’m
fine
. I’ve got it. Just gonna take a walk through
the house and make sure we’re still… alone.”

That sends a different kind of chill up
her back. This lovely and
interesting
architecture that she would’ve enjoyed viewing when she was
still in college now just seems ghostly, creepy, and very
potentially dangerous if people would find them.

“Sure. I’ll just stay here and pack things
away then,” Paige says.

When she turns back, his boots and gun are
gone and so is he. For being a big man, he can move very quietly
when he needs to. Paige carefully stows away their equipment, food,
and dry items. Anything that’s wet, she tries to spread out on
chairs and the table near the fire. Then she pulls on her boots and
waits for him to return. He seems to be taking an inordinately long
period of time doing his check. She crosses the room and opens the
door.

“Cory!” she whispers but doesn’t get an
answer or see his light. “Crap.”

She grabs her baggie of dry rags from her
pack and heads back for the door.

“Did you call me?” he asks, startling her to
the point that she yelps. “Sorry. I thought I heard you.”

Paige drops her hand from her pounding heart
and says, “Yes, I need to go to the bathroom. I just didn’t want
you to shoot me.”

“Oh, ok. I’ll take you.”

“No way. I’ll find it on my own,” Paige
insists.

“Forget it then. You’ll have to hold it till
morning. You aren’t going out there without me,” he dictates as he
points to the door with one long finger.

“Damn it. Fine. I’m not holding it until
morning,” she complains and follows him from the room.

“Come with me,” he tells her. “There’s a
bathroom in the back of this place. I think someone winterized the
toilets, so you can go in there. Probably a caretaker or someone
did it so the pipes wouldn’t freeze and burst.”

He leads her by the hand downstairs again,
and she can’t verbalize it to him, but having her hand in his does
make her feel safer in this spooky old, dark house. They go past
the main tourist areas and off to the side where a small section of
the home was probably used by the tour guides and employees or
volunteers.

“Yeah, we saw a lot of those kinds of flooded
and destroyed homes and buildings over the years,” she tells
him.

“Me, too,” he confides.

“I always felt depressed by those places. You
know someone lived in them once. They were homes to people. Someone
designed and built them. Now they are just ruined, uninhabitable
structures.”

“I never thought of it like that. I just saw
them as places to loot for supplies,” Cory tells her as he shows
her the bathroom.

She places her candle on the sink’s
countertop and tries to close the door. He doesn’t move. As a
matter of fact, his foot is stopping it from shutting.

“You aren’t staying,” Paige informs him and
shoves gently to the center of his chest. It doesn’t really do
anything, but he does back up of his own volition and leave the
bathroom.

When she’s done, he escorts her back upstairs
to their shared room. He locks the door and begins preparations for
sleep. Paige removes her boots and places them right next to the
bed again. Cory takes a pile of blankets and the other pillow and
starts spreading them out on the floor.

“I cleaned the bed linens. What are you
doing?” she asks as she pulls back the quilt and top sheet on the
bed.

“Making my own bed,” he says without looking
at her.

“But what are you doing? Are you gonna sleep
on the hard floor?”

He looks directly at her, pauses what
he’s doing and says very
simply
,
“Yeah. Of course.”

“You can sleep on the other side of the bed.
You don’t have to sleep down there.”

“No, thanks.”

Paige frowns with confusion as he snatches a
pillow from the bed.

“I mean, if you wanted
to sleep in
another room, I guess that’s
fine. I’d prefer it if you don’t, though. This place is kind of
creepy,” Paige admits as she looks around at the dark shadows and
old furniture. “It was probably grand and beautiful at one time,
but tonight it’s just creepy.”

“I like my balls, so I’ll sleep on the
floor,” Cory remarks, his
deep
voice void of humor.

“What?” Paige screeches on a giggle.

“If I crawl into that bed with you, your
brother might divest me of them,” Cory jokes this time.

Paige laughs and says, “He’s not really in
charge of me, even though he thinks he is. I’m an adult, Cory.”