I collapsed on the pillows and then turned my back to the door.

“Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap,” I whispered to myself again and again, holding the pillow to me. Then I stopped when I thought maybe Vance could hear.

Something was stealing over me, over my skin, through my insides, both places it felt like velvet. Then it was all around me like a cocoon, warm and sweet and safe.

Then Auntie Reba’s voice came to me, the first time in years.

After she died I’d hear it a lot, sometimes memories, sometimes like she was talking to me. I used to think I was a little insane so I kept it to myself. I didn’t even tell Nick. It was my secret and I didn’t want anyone to talk me out of having her voice with me. The months passed and it went away but now it was back. I heard her voice, soft and wise, just like it had been the day she said the words.

Nick was in danger of getting transferred to Springfield, Illinois. I didn’t want to go to Springfield. Nick didn’t want to go to Springfield. Auntie Reba didn’t want to go to Springfield. We were in the kitchen and I was pitching a teenaged fit. Denver was all I knew, it was home.

Auntie Reba, on the other hand, seemed totally at peace.

“How can you be so calm?” I’d shouted.

She turned to me, a small smile on her lips. “Jules, sweetheart, home isn’t a place. Home is anywhere, just as long as the people you love are there.”

Nick never got transferred and a few months later Auntie Reba died.

And home was torn away from us. We’d been homeless ever since.

Or we thought we were.

The tears hit my chest with a weight so hard it shoved itself up my throat and I could do nothing about it. It hurt too much to hold them back, they sprang from my eyes.

I was finally, finally back home.

But having Nick all these years I realized I’d never left.

“I’m so stupid,” I told the pillow.

“Jules?”

I turned in the bed, flat on my back and looked at Vance standing in the doorway, tears streaming from my eyes.

“I… I’m so f… fucking stupid,” I sobbed.

“Jesus,” he whispered, took two long strides and then I was in his arms.

“She left and sh… she was… ho… ho… home,” I said against his neck, somehow I was in his lap and holding on tight. “And N… N… Nick and now this. I’m so stupid.”

I was making no sense. I knew it but I couldn’t help it.

Vance had an arm tight around my waist, the other hand stroking my back.

“She died twelve years ago. When is it going to stop hurting!” I screamed over his shoulder.

“I don’t know, Princess,” Vance murmured into my neck.

I sat in his lap holding on to him and then all of a sudden I shouted, “I’m a freak!”

I was bouncing from subject to subject, my mind unable to hold a thought.

He pulled away and looked at me. “Sorry?”

“I’m twenty-seven years old and I’ve never had a boyfriend. I’m a total, f**king freak. I don’t know what to do with you. Even though I’ve semi-gotten over the whole Vance Crowe, badass, super-cool, macho-man, danger-seeker gig, that still, like, flips me out, by the way, now I don’t know how to be normal. I don’t know what to do. Auntie Reba would tell me.”

Vance was staring at me like he didn’t know what to do either but was leaning towards a call to the doctor.

“I need to call Nick,” I announced, “I have to tell him I love him.”

“It’s barely six o’clock in the morning.”

“He’s an early riser.”

“Jules, I think he knows you love him.”

I stared at him and narrowed my eyes. “Are you sure?”

He grinned at me. “Pretty much.”

I nodded my head decisively once. “Okay then,” I said.

Vance kept watching me closely.

Finally he asked, “Are you all right?”

“No, I’m not all right. I’m stupid. I’m totally clueless. I’m a mess. I’m a freak. I thought we’d already established that.”

His grin faded and the atmosphere in the room went electric. I’d been relaxed even though I was crying; my body was using his for strength and warmth. I tensed when the room changed because he’d tensed in fact he went solid as a rock.

His arms went from around me and he pulled the ponytail holder out of the mess of hair at the top of my head and then twisted, tossing it on the nightstand.

The he came back to me.

When he did even in the dim light I saw his eyes were intense, more intense than usual, burning into me. His hands slid through my hair at the sides of my head, his fingers combing through it all the way down my back. His hands came up again, to either side of my head, holding it in position to look at him, his thumbs coming forward and wiping away my tears. I got the impression he did all this as an effort at control. What he was trying to control, I did not know but I was about to find out.

“You’re a woman who lost her family, all of her family, and did what she had to do to keep going. There’s not one f**kin’ thing stupid or clueless about that.”

“Crowe –”

He interrupted me. “I hear you call yourself that again, it’s gonna piss me off.”

Um.

Yikes.

He already sounded pissed off.

“Are you angry with me?” I whispered.

He ignored my question and carried on. “If you’d given yourself to someone else, you wouldn’t be mine. And that would seriously piss me off.”

Okay, now he sounded seriously pissed off.

“Crowe –” I tried again.

“Far as I can see with the time she had, your aunt did a f**kin’ great job with you and left you in the hands of a man who handled you with care. I can understand you miss her but if she was alive, she’d be proud of who you’ve become.”

Oh my God.

That velvet feeling was back and it wasn’t only enshrouding me, it had Vance wrapped up in it too.

“Crowe, stop talking,” I whispered.

“You want to know more about me?” he offered and at that moment I didn’t. I couldn’t take anymore.

I didn’t have the choice.

“My life has been shit. I’d never been touched with gentleness, never understood it until I saw you handle Roam in Fortnum’s. Then that night watchin’ football with Nick, you showed it to me by runnin’ your fingers along my jaw after I told you the worst in me. I was once Roam, Jules. You might not think it but it isn’t the kids who have two parents and a stable home who are the luckiest ones. It’s the kids who know the taste of shit because they’ve been eatin’ it all their lives and then someone finds them and offers them a taste of somethin’ sweeter and they learn that life can be good. They learn to trust. They learn that if you care about someone you put your ass on the line to keep them safe. They learn that love doesn’t come with conditions. Roam and Sniff are the luckiest kids alive. I never had that. No one gave a shit enough to see it through. No one ever offered me that, until you.”