He grabbed the weight bench and squeezed until it creaked, telling himself if he punched the shed wall, it’d fold and he’d need a new shed. “Please go inside,” he whispered.

He knew that asshole had tied her up. She’d told him that. Funny how that did nothing to quench the fire in his brain at the fresh thought of her yanking against handcuffs until she started to bleed.

Fuck, they made you so powerless. He’d pulled so hard today, and the handcuffs had barely scuffed the skin. His marks wouldn’t even scar.

Her hands spread over his back, gentle and so small. “LJ, what happened to you?” she whispered. And then she was hugging him, her cheek over his spine; his wet, filthy shirt against her skin.

He pulled away, pacing out of the shed. “I’ll be back.” If she wouldn’t go, he would.

She must have sprinted to catch up with him, because in an instant she was in front of him, her eyes flashing. “You don’t have to hide from me every time you’re angry. You don’t scare me, LJ Delisle.”

As he stared down at her, something shifted in him. She was telling the truth.

He hated the way those cops had eyed him today, one hand on their Tasers and the other creeping toward their guns. But that wasn’t the way Andra was looking at him now.

“Why not?” he asked, his voice scraping raw out of his throat.

She shook her head. “You’re the last person alive who would hurt me. The only thing I’m scared of is what you’d do if somebody else did.”

She took his hand, and he folded his fingers gently around hers, letting her lead him back toward the shed. She sat down on the weight bench and pulled him down next to her.

“Now tell me what happened to you today, because whatever news could piss you off this much actually does freak me out.”

“Not news.” He let go of her hand and bent forward to lean his elbows on his knees, rubbing his eyes. “It sure ain’t anything new, Andie-girl.”

“Okay.”

He sighed. “Took a two-day job as extra bodies for an overbooked moving company. We filled up the moving van. Instead of making two trips, Ty put the last few things in my truck. Cops came driving by and saw a couple of black guys loading antique furniture out the back door of a Garden District mansion into a Datsun. They decided we were stealing it. We weren’t wearing uniforms, the moving company’s van had already gone ahead, and—”

He shoved to his feet, picked up the bench press bar, and resettled it in the stand with a grunt of effort. She moved off the bench to make space for him.