Chapter 662
[ 507 words ]
Chapter 662:
He had not moved. He had not touched her. He had not needed to. His eyes had seen everything: the angle of the knee, the lack of hesitation, the controlled line of her hips, the way her body had chosen the most devastating target before her mind could stop it.
The pain in Bell’s arm was already fading. Jarrod’s attention was not on him. It was fixed entirely on Caroline.
He slowly straightened in the chair, his eyes never leaving her face. The exhaustion, the injury, the physical limitation, none of it softened the cold, analytical focus now sharpening in his expression.
“Where,” he said, his voice dangerously quiet, “did you learn to do that?”
The question hung in the frozen air of the room, sharp and deadly as a shard of ice. Jarrod’s eyes were drilling into her, stripping away her flimsy cover story layer by layer. Her mind raced, a supercomputer cycling through a million possible lies, searching for the one that would save her.
She chose the only defense she had left. She collapsed.
Her body began to tremble, a violent, uncontrollable shudder. Her eyes, which had been wide with shock, filled with tears. Her breath came in ragged, panicked gasps. It was a perfect, textbook depiction of a trauma response.
“You scared me!” she cried, her voice breaking, thick with manufactured hysteria. “That was… that was the move they taught us! In the self-defense class I took in D.C.!”
She pushed herself away from the wall, wrapping her arms around her body as if holding herself together. “They said if a man ever pins you like that… you do whatever it takes. You don’t think. You just react.”
The lie slipped out as easily as a breath, a pre-programmed defense mechanism for her true identity.
She looked at him, her face a mask of terror and accusation. “The way you pushed me… it felt just like… like that time at the hospital… when that man…” She let the sentence hang, letting his own guilt fill in the blanks.
𝘔𝗼𝗿𝘦 𝗇o𝗏е𝘭𝗌 𝗼𝘯 𝗀a𝘭no𝗏𝘦𝘭s.𝘤o𝘮
The suspicion in Jarrod’s eyes vanished, instantly replaced by a wave of profound, gut-wrenching remorse. He saw not a trained operator, but a terrified woman whose past trauma he had just carelessly triggered.
“Damn it,” he cursed, his voice a low, self-loathing growl. He took a half-step back, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender, of peace. “Caroline. I’m sorry. I was just trying to simulate a real threat.”
His gloved fingers, so recently a source of menace, came up to her face. He gently, almost reverently, wiped away the tears she had forced from her eyes.
The moment of contact was her cue. She sagged against him, burying her face in his chest, letting him feel the frantic, artificially accelerated beat of her heart. She was safe. For now.
He held her tightly, his arms a protective cage. He rested his chin on the top of her head. “This is why you need this training,” he murmured, his voice thick with a renewed, fierce determination. “So you never have to feel that powerless again.”
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