Tempted by love

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

“My hero,” I mocked with a roll of my grassy sea-green eyes.   

I fluttered my lids sarcastically, though I should have been more thankful that Mason Walsh had just saved my life.

He too, met my eye-roll with one of his own.

His hand never loosened its death like grip on my upper arm as he pulled me deeper into the house, up to his room. He scanned the grounds outside with conscientious eyes through his window and released me, before dropping to his knees and pulling something out from under his bed, a bag of sorts.          

“So what’s the plan?” My mind raced backed to the dead bodies on the snow outside. The pale ghost faces that should haunt me and have me trembling at my knees, but the adrenaline shot running through me was the only thing keeping me whole and being sane. The core of my stomach fluttered and my heart was thumping so hard as if I had just watched a scary movie twice.     

Mason ran his hand through his short shaggy dark brown hair. The slight stubble made him look edgier – older and deathlier. “The plan was simple, Ari,” he snapped.  “Don’t go outside, just listen to your father’s simple rules but you never did.”                        

He pointed to the phone in my hand. I hadn’t even realised that I still had it. Mason stared straight at me with an antagonising look, and I felt a chill run down my spine all the way to my toes. “You saying this is all my fault!” I screamed.  

Mason only turned his back on me ruffling through a bag that he had thumped over on the bed. He zipped it back up and checked the number of bullets in his gun.  I could see how angry he was with me. Mason slung the bag on his back.

“Come on! We are leaving. I can’t deal with your Crap right now.” His hand once again gripped my arm and pulled me in the direction of the window where he scanned the ground and the distance.

Then he swirled me in a different direction, out his door and down the passage, halting when he heard the turn of the brass doorknob downstairs. He groaned, frustrated and annoyed, pulling me back to his bedroom and back to the window.                                                   

“Where are we going?” I asked.     

“Out the window,” he muttered, annoyed. 

I pouted. “This is no time for your lame jokes, Mason.”       

“Have you ever heard me joke?”    

I watched him lift open the closed window on the right side of his bed. One of his legs disappeared outside. I frowned as I watched him pull his large muscular frame out the window and his hand motioned for me to follow. My fingers curled on the window still and peered out and around. “Why can’t we use the front door?”                         

“Ari, why do you have to be so obstinate about things?” he rebuked, dusking his hands as he balanced off the ledge, scowling at me from the outside.  

“I’m just being realistic, Mason, I saw you fight those other guys, why can’t you do the same?” I asked, shaking my head and taking tiny steps away from the window.

Mason frowned, watching me distance myself from him and the anger flushed through him.

I was clearing working a wrong nerve by choosing a rather pinnacle moment where our lives were hanging on a thin line with strange men in black balaclava’s streaming on the first floor of the building.