Page 37 of I Choose You (Wilder #2)

Claire

I woke up slowly. It was hard to tell what time it was with the blackout curtains blocking any potential sunlight.

I reached over to check on Reid, finding his side of the bed empty.

He had slept most of the day yesterday, barely eating anything.

The blizzard continued to rage around us, but that was the least of our concerns.

I heard a noise, and it took a second for it to register in my brain. Retching was coming from the bathroom.

Poor Reid. He looked like death yesterday. His face was ghostly pale, and his eyes were heavy and red. His pillow was wet from sweat.

“Hey,” I called softly as I opened the bathroom door. “Are you okay?”

“Don’t come in here,” he mumbled. He leaned his back against the bathroom wall and reached for the toilet handle.

I found my bag and pulled out a bottle of water, handing it to him.

Reid struggled to open it, eventually resting his head against the wall and handing the water back to me. He didn’t even look like himself, his strong, confident demeanor gone.

I uncapped the bottle and passed it back to him, kneeling beside him.

“Here, small sips. Don’t gulp it down.” He nodded slightly and followed my instructions. “Do you still feel nauseous?”

“Yeah, go back to sleep. Just leave me here.”

I almost wanted to laugh at how dramatic he sounded, but I held back. He truly didn’t feel well, and I did feel bad for him. I sat next to him and rested my head on his pec.

“You shouldn’t be in here. You don’t need to see this. I’ll get you sick next,” he mumbled sleepily, his hand roughly stroking my hair.

His hand stilled, and he tugged me off his chest, diving forward for the toilet bowl. I rubbed his back, letting him know I was here for him. Once he finished emptying his stomach, I passed him the water and stroked his head.

I called down to the front desk to see if they had any medicine on-site. They had some general ibuprofen. I asked if they could send it to our room—at least it would help with the fever—along with an additional pillow to replace the one that Reid had slept on and two more bottles of water.

Reid shuffled to the bed like a zombie, his body too weak to pick up his feet. I got him settled on the side of the bed where I had slept. At least it wasn’t wet with sweat. His temperature was definitely elevated, so I went to the bathroom to wet a facecloth for him.

A knock on the door came a minute later. A housekeeper delivered the supplies I had asked for, and I gave her a tip for her trouble.

Reid was already asleep again, so I took the new pillow and set it on the chair. I sat atop the blanket next to his curled-up, sick body, gently pressing the cool facecloth to his forehead.

He moaned in appreciation, his eyelids fluttering. I sat like that for a while, running my fingers through his hair and resting the cloth against his warm skin. When I pulled back so I could rewet the facecloth, keeping it cool, Reid reached out and grabbed my hand.

“No,” he mumbled. “Don’t go.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to get the cloth cold again. I’ll be right back.” I kissed his forehead.

“Don’t leave me. I love you.”

I stilled.

His voice was soft and mumbled. He was probably asleep in some fever dream. He didn’t mean it, but it made my heart beat faster all the same.

He loved me?

No. He was just delirious.

Right?

I ran cold water over the facecloth and over my wrists. I was starting to get warm. I hoped I wasn’t getting what he had. We couldn’t both be down for the count.

The clock on the nightstand read 4:00 a.m. I sat beside Reid, occasionally rewetting the cloth and coming right back for the next few hours. Finally, his fever broke around 6:30 a.m., so I left him to sleep peacefully and made up the chair for myself.

My mind was racing. Was Reid expressing his innermost thoughts when he mumbled those words? Was he just appreciative of me taking care of him? Was it a fever dream that had him saying things he didn’t mean?

He couldn’t be in love with me. This was temporary. He knew that. I knew that. But we hadn’t talked about it in a while. I had been avoiding bringing it up, enjoying our moments together far too much to risk it all going up in flames.

The hard chair was uncomfortable, and from where I was, I could see the first rays of light through a crack in the curtains. Sleep wasn’t happening tonight, so after I tossed and turned for a while, trying to find a position that didn’t hurt my back, I gave up on it and got in the shower.

Reid was awake when I came out of the bathroom, looking so much better than he did last night, but still not one hundred percent.

“Morning. How are you feeling?”

“Better, mostly.” His eyes raked down my body—I had only a towel wrapped around me—before they flitted to the chair where a blanket and pillow were still laid out. “Did you sleep on the chair last night?”

“Not really. I lay there for a few hours this morning. Mostly, I sat by you, trying to cool your temperature down after you emptied your stomach.”

Reid groaned. “I’m sorry. You didn’t need to see that.”

I laughed lightly. He had said the same thing last night. Not that he seemed to remember it.

“Do you remember anything from last night?” I pulled the towel away from my body, using it to pat my hair dry.

His gaze zeroed in on my boobs, then trailed up and down my body. His jaw hung open, and his tongue swiped across his bottom lip.

“Not really. But if I embarrassed myself or said something stupid, then I am very, very sorry. Extremely sorry. Please don’t hold it against me, unless that ‘it’ is your perfect body. Then you can hold it against me all you want. ”

He stalked toward me like a predator, desire and lust blazing in his eyes.

“Oh, no. I don’t think so,” I laughed, poking him in the chest. “I saw some things last night. You’re going to need a minimum of twelve hours of keeping food down.”

His groan was mixed with laughter. “That seems fair.” He looked me in the eye and wrapped his hand around my head. “Thank you for taking care of me. I really appreciate it.” He placed a soft kiss to my forehead.

“You’re welcome.”

He showered and dressed, but it looked like it sucked all of his energy to do so. He sat on the bed, looking at his boots for five whole minutes, trying to muster the energy to put them on. If that was how he was feeling before we even left the hotel, he would never be able to get through the day.

“Rest. You’re still recovering. I’ll call Davis’s and see when we can reschedule it. If they have to ship them instead, then we’ll do that.”

“No. We came all the way up here. I want to get you those lights.”

I didn’t miss the way he said that. He needed these lights more than I did, but he knew how excited I was to finally see them. We drove seven—well, five of the seven—hours away in a blizzard because I said I wanted them as soon as possible.

“Let me at least call and see what he says.”

Reid nodded and lay down while I made the call.

As it turned out, the shop was closed due to the weather.

A state of emergency had been issued, halting all travel.

I told Mr. Davis that we were planning on being here for the weekend, and he agreed to meet us at the shop on Saturday, as long as the travel ban was lifted, to get everything loaded .

“All set…” I started. Reid was snoring softly, laid out like a starfish on the bed. Yeah, we weren’t going anywhere today.

Reid had napped off and on all day. The hotel didn’t have a restaurant on-site, so we filled up on vending machine snacks and made do with that.

He managed to keep all of it down, so when nighttime came, I weighed the risk of catching what Reid had against the uncomfortable chair.

Sleeping in bed with Reid was far better than trying to handle another night in that chair, even if I ended up getting sick.

And at this point, that seemed unlikely anyway.

I curled up beside him and felt the weight of his arm as he slung it around my waist and hauled me to him. My butt pressed into him, and he groaned in my ear.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“What are you sorry for?” I turned my head to him.

“I wanted us to have a nice weekend away. And I have you in this bed, pressing your hot, little ass against my dick, and I’m pretty sure I’ll pass out if I start something.”

“Can I be honest with you?”

“Always.”

“The first time we had sex and we didn’t cuddle afterwards. You said that I wasn’t a cuddler, but that isn’t true. I was just all up in my head and didn’t know what to do. Maybe this can be our makeup cuddle.”

He kissed the back of my neck, his hand moving softly up the front of my shirt.

“I fucking love cuddling with you.”

I wrapped my arm over his and fell asleep to the feel of his strong body holding me tightly.

* * *

The travel ban was lifted overnight. We still had about two more hours of driving to get to Davis Ironworks’ shop, plus we needed to figure out how we were going to dig ourselves out of the three feet of snow.

Reid was pretty much back to normal, and we both thanked our lucky stars that whatever he had didn’t seem to have passed to me.

He talked to the front desk about possibly using a snow shovel, and the hotel did one better and sent a maintenance person out to help.

I watched him from the window, his muscular back hauling shovels full of snow away from the U-Haul.

It didn’t take long for me to pack up our stuff, and I met him by the truck with our bags just as they were finishing up.

“You didn’t have to haul the bags down. I would have come and got them.”

“I’ve got them.” I smiled at him.

Reid thanked the man and pulled a tip from his wallet.

“No,” he said, waving his hand in the air. “You get your girl home safe.”

Reid and I both thanked him again.