A new week, a new chapter! I hope everyone (who's already up, like me) is having an awesome Monday. What am I saying? It's Monday! That's not possible. Anyway, here we go.

You'll notice things getting a little heated between Edward and Bella in this chapter - and many of the ones to come. Just so we're clear, it's been a day. Is that normal? Maybe not, but with these two, how can you predict anything?

The danger element is changing in this one too, so along with a new development on the horizon, it's going to be getting a little complicated.

I don't own Twilight. I'm just making new waves in the sand patterns of SM's zen garden.

This is also un-beta'd, so any lingering mistakes you see are mine.

Taking a Chance

After breakfast, my hip is throbbing even worse than it was in the car, and I'm doing my best not to lose the food I just ate. Bella is watching me from her side of the table. The look in her eyes tells me she can see how uncomfortable I am. The waitress refills our glasses a couple of times, but other than that, we're left alone. After the second time, Bella moves around to my side.

"Is it safe for you to still drive?" she asks, glancing at my hip and then gently laying her hand over my waist.

Pain and discomfort spreads through my right side, and I have to hold my breath as she removes her hand.

"Sorry," she whispers.

A moment of silence passes, and then I speak softly. "We can't stay put for too long. The longer we stay anywhere, the more likely they'll catch up to us. And I so much as promised your father I would keep you safe. If we stop, I can't do that any better than if we'd stayed in your house for the cleaning crew."

Though it stuns her that I'm being more brutally honest than I was before, she doesn't seem deterred. "That doesn't mean you can't rest. I should've stitched you back up or something. Eight hours," she says. "Long enough for you to sleep."

Her boldness makes me smile, but I shake my head. "We can't stay here that long. Four hours would be pushing it, and that's if I was able to contact my father."

"Six," she bargains.

I watch her thoughtfully. "Five. And that's it. Finish your breakfast."

A victorious smile spreads over her face, and she pulls her plate to where she's sitting. I'm surprised that she's not moving back to the other side of the booth, but after scooting over to give her room, I decide it doesn't matter where she sits anymore.

A hotel on the other side of the street looks like it will work for the few hours we need, and without moving the Jeep, Bella and I grab our bags to cross the street to check in. The woman at the front desk doesn't seem thrilled about the fact that we're only needing a room for a few hours. I admit that it's a little odd, but I give her an extra hundred dollars to keep her happy while we move through the front lobby to the stairs.

The room only has one bed and a small bathroom, but it's enough. Bella insists on checking my hip before we do anything else, and I'm not hesitant about allowing her to look at my bandage. This time, I keep my pants on.

We can't risk putting a needle and thread in her hands, so after she puts on another bandage and cleans up the bathroom, I sit down on the bed to plug my laptop back up. The wi-fi is weak, but it's good enough for my email to work, and after a night's worth of driving, eating and bandage-changing, I'm able to open the email my father sent me the night before.

Possible sighting, details to come later, the subject line reads like a burning bush.

My heart is literally hammering in my chest as I open the email, hoping I haven't completely ruined my chances of getting Bella to a safe place by being so immensely stupid.

Message received. Will deliver to Mother. Bird sighting unconfirmed near secondary location. Bears and honey arrived with new details from Southern office. Black birds safely delivered. Had to call main office. Will not force your hand. Keep contact once arrival is confirmed.

Someone saw Bella in Hoquiam. It's the only thing that makes sense. Aro has men all up and down the west coast. If we'd gone further south into California, it would've been even more impossible to stay hidden, but with the towns around us now being so small, blending in will prove to be difficult.

"Is everything okay?" Bella asks from the table by the window.

"For now," I reply. "Emmett and Jasper are in Chicago with my father, and your parents are safe. My father had to call Aro, but he didn't tell him anything."

While talking to her, I'm already composing a new email for my father. I want to talk to him, but by the time I put my phone back together, the GPS would triangulate before I could dial my father's number.

Arrival at safe location imminent. Tracking hindered temporarily. Primary and secondary targets secured. Acquired new method of travel. Will make new contact unless otherwise detained.

Using the same subject as before, I send a new email to my father and set the laptop aside as Bella watches me from her chair.

"You need to sleep," she says.

I'm relaxed enough to not need pain meds for my hip, and I stare at her with a measure of uncertainty. "You thinking about going somewhere?" I ask, suspiciously.

She scoffs and looks away out the window. "You're paranoid."

"I'm cautious. And you're careless."

"I'm eighteen! I'm allowed to be careless. And you're dangerous."

"I know how to use a semi-automatic rifle and highly combustible explosives! Of course I'm dangerous. You're the one who hacked at my hip bone."

She turns to me and yells even with a smile on her face. "You told me to!"

I can't stop the laugh that escapes my lips, and before I realize it, she charges the bed and is on top of me in less than a split second. I catch her uneasily, the laugh in my chest dying as she grips my shoulders and straddles my hips.

The jostling of the bed makes my hip hurt, and I clench my jaws without looking at her.

"You are paranoid," she says again.

With a deep breath, I lift my eyes to hers. "And for good reason," I counter. "If Aro's men find us, they will kill you — just on principle alone. And they'll kill me and everyone who's helped me for keeping you alive."

I can't push her away. I don't know why. It's dangerous what she's doing, and she doesn't seem to care how serious this all is. She touches my face and finds a scar on my jaw that I got my first day of training when I was her age. A different set of chills from what I've ever felt spreads through my neck and then my chest, and there's nothing I can do to stop her as she leans in and gently presses her lips to mine.

She so warm and soft, and I don't know what I'm doing letting her touch me like this. It's not safe, and she has no idea who I am to be doing this right now. But I can't push her away. So when I don't, she wraps her arm around my shoulders and threads her fingers through my hair, causing another set of chills to assail my skin. Instinctively, I sit up to pull her closer to me, and in the process, a sharp throb of pain shoots up my side, forcing a groan to escape my lips as they become dislodged from hers.

"You're still hurting," she whispers. Then she shakes her head. "I shouldn't — " The tip of her tongue slips over her bottom lip, and I fight the pain in my right side to pull her closer, meeting her tongue with mine and hearing the tiniest whimper erupt from her tiny throat.

I'm breathless when she nudges me away, uncertain what's wrong with me and unwilling to let it spread any further than it already has even though I already know it's gone too far. The loss of her warmth terrifies me as she scoots off the bed and retrieves my bag, and I back away from her when she sits back in front of me with the pills from my bag for my hip.

She smiles as she lays them in my palm. "I promise not to leave you here."

I hesitate, and she laughs.

"Edward, I promise."

It's only the third time she's said my name, and it's completely different from the other two times. Gently, I take the pills and swallow them with a gulp of water just as a new email hits my inbox.

Local sweeping, traces found.

The subject line of his response is a little confusing, and as I open up his email, Bella scoots up to my left side to read with me.

Main office unaware of change. Bags arrived in morgue. Under lockdown until report is confirmed. Interstate under surveillance. Back roads overgrown. No more contact until safe arrival.

I know not to respond to this message, shutting off my laptop and pulling the battery out as Bella speaks softly.

"Who are Emmett and Jasper?" she asks.

"Men who work for my father," I say simply.

"I thought you all worked for the same guy," she continues.

I sigh softly, feeling the pills taking a hold on my consciousness. "It's complicated. My father's a careful man. He doesn't trust Aro, at least not for the important tasks that deal with training and disposal. A few years after he sent me to Aro to be trained, my mother convinced him to hire a new pair of guards for them. And like I said, my father is a careful man. Emmett and Jasper are supposed to be in extension offices, and every few months, they spend a week in other offices to keep their real jobs a secret."

"That doesn't sound complicated. It sounds like their job is simple."

I laugh and lay my head back against the wall behind me. "Sounds like. But not really." The room starts to spin, and I look at her to see more than one of her beside me. "How did you learn to kiss like that?" I ask quietly.

She grins and rubs my cheek. "Just because I'm eighteen doesn't mean I've never had a boyfriend."

There's no hesitation in my movements as I wrap my arm around her and pull her closer. "Football quarterback or science geek?"

"A little bit of both actually. You should sleep. I promise to wake you up if anything happens."

The fight I would've normally put up is gone, and I close my eyes slowly, giving in to the spinning without another minute passing.

A new dream fills my head as I sleep, and the indication of it is plain even to me as my hands find the gentle slopes of Bella's hips and her little pink lips and warm tongue entice my brain even more than her eyes and hair have before. While I've had a few wet or erotic dreams in my life that had a similar effect on me, nothing has ever felt like this.

What does this mean? How am I supposed to cope with this? Why is it happening to me now?

By the time I open my eyes to see midday sun shining through the window, I have no answers to any of these questions. Will I ever have any?

A clock on the wall tells me it's almost noon, and the bathroom door opens a minute later to reveal Bella there in a towel with her hair wet from taking a shower. In this particular article of "clothing," she looks tiny and fragile, but her near nakedness doesn't deter her from moving to my side and sitting in front of me with her legs crossed.

"You need to take a shower," she says nonchalantly, like she's not sitting there in a towel. "And I was thinking we should cut my hair. And maybe color it too. They'll know what I look like, won't they?"

Sleepily, I nod, and she pulls her hair over her shoulder so that it leaves her other shoulder glistening in the brilliant gold light.

"I don't mind," she says. "If it helps, we should do it."

I can't take my eyes off her bare skin, and she smiles, leaning over with her hand pressed to the bed beside my hip.

"His name was Mike. He was a senior like me before my dad pulled me out of school. We dated for about a year."

She leans closer so that her toweled chest is aligned with mine and her face is closer to mine than it was a minute earlier. "He was tall and blond and muscled. He was a tight-end on the football team, but he was also a straight-A student. We were going to enroll to Washington State together. I'd never had a boyfriend before him, and he taught me how to kiss."

The edges of my mind clear away the haze of the pain pills I took earlier, and when I scoot away to sit up, she follows me. The towel covering her stops covering her as the slit up her leg exposes her hip and a little more.

"Bella," I whisper, meaning to tell her she needs to get dressed, but before I can, she closes the distance between us and kisses me again. My hand finds her soft, wet skin, and her tongue slips inside my mouth a second before I push her away. "Stop," I plead.

She doesn't listen, moving closer and then lifting her leg to straddle me again. My body wants her. I can feel my cock getting harder the longer she's close to me. And my brain is quickly following her.

But I can't do this.

"Bella, stop," I hiss against her lips.

The instant I feel her fingers twisting my pants apart, a swell in my anger forces its way to the surface, and I grab her arms to push her away until she's laying back over the bed under me.

"Stop," I yell. "I can't do this."

Surprise and fear fill her eyes along with a few tears, and I get up away from her without another word, stepping into the bathroom and slamming the door shut.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

She's eighteen! I'm better than this. It's just what James would do. I don't care if she had a boyfriend who taught her how to kiss.

I can't do this!

I don't leave the bathroom until after I've showered myself and put on a new bandage. I realize that my bag is in the bedroom, and even though I don't want to step into that room in a goddamn towel, I don't have a choice.

She's sitting at the table in the sunlight wearing a pair of shorts and a long-sleeved shirt like the one she was wearing the morning before. Without saying anything to her, I grab my bag and step back into the bathroom to get dressed.

Why is she behaving this way after just a day? She doesn't know me, and I can't know her. Why am I scared of her? She's a fucking teenager, for God's sake. How am I supposed to handle something like this?

After asking myself even more questions than what I have answers to, I leave the bathroom with my bag to find her still at the table. She doesn't look at me as I sit in the chair next to hers, but I don't let that stop me.

"I'm sorry I yelled at you," I say to start. "You surprised me."

Tears fall from her eyes, and I huff, rubbing my forehead and then covering my eyes.

"Bella, please."

"It's okay," she replies. "I — I don't know why I did that. You have no idea what it's been like with just me and my parents. My dad wouldn't let me go out of the house unless I was with him or mom. My friends and I had all just started our senior year, and I didn't even make it to homecoming before he pulled me out of school. Mike was really the first guy to be nice to me, and we started dating under the impression that it wouldn't last very long. And now I'm never gonna see him or my friends again." She wipes her cheeks and then looks at me. "You could've killed me, but you didn't. Why?"

I shake my head because I still don't know. I remember what my father said about how I followed my conscience the way he taught me. Deep down, I knew it was wrong to kill Bella and her parents. But why her? Why not Irina or any other woman I've ever been faced with killing in the last eight years?

"I don't know," I say softly. "I just know it was wrong. But a lot of them were wrong, and I haven't figured that out yet. I'm sorry I yelled at you. I wasn't expecting you to do that."

"I wasn't planning on doing it," she insists. "But I saw you sitting there, and it happened. Hasn't that ever happened to you?"

"No," I say honestly. "No one's ever done anything like that to me."

And it's true. Kate has never come onto me like that. In fact, there's no match in my head for what Bella just did. And I have to make her understand something else.

"Bella, it's dangerous to do that right now. And you didn't do anything wrong, but you can't do it again. I'm not the kind of guy you want to get involved with, because I really have killed people. And I'm never gonna change."

She scoffs and shakes her head, looking away again.

"What?" I ask, suddenly annoyed.

"You could've killed me," she says again. "And I saw the look in your eyes. You were scared and confused. It was different with that asshole who grabbed me and tried to leave the house with me. He wasn't like you. And it doesn't matter to me what you've done before. What matters is that you stopped before you could hurt me or my parents. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

Exhaling softly, I press my lips together. "Of course it means something to me. Bella, it means everything right now. It means I've had to change the way I react and speak and listen. It means I have to be even more careful than I've ever been in my life, and this isn't something I need to do right now."

"So because of what you've done before, you're saying you don't deserve to start over. You're already changing, Edward. And you know what would've happened if anyone else had gone to kill me and my parents."

It doesn't seem like anything I say will make her understand how dangerous her line of thinking is. And when she scoots her chair closer to me, the look in her eyes tells me she's going to continue trying to convince me she's right.

"Have you ever loved anyone, Edward?"

She keeps saying my name, and it's having the strangest effect on my brain. But I have to shake my head. "No. Not really. No one except my own family."

"Not even the woman who killed that man with you?"

An image of Kate lying on the ground with a bullet wound in her gut and tears on her face flashes before my eyes, and I react instantly, clenching my teeth and looking away. "Don't talk about her," I order.

Bella rises slowly and steps closer to me, straddling my lap and wrapping her arms around my shoulders. I won't look at her, and she kisses my cheek gently. "Edward," she whispers. "It's okay. Most people who are in love don't know it until they lose it. That's what my mother told me when I thought I was in love with Mike. But I wasn't. He was nice and cute and smart, but when I really needed him, he wasn't there for me. That's why we broke up." She turns my face to hers, and I reluctantly lift my eyes to hers. "You're different, Edward."

I can't deny what she says, not even when she kisses me lightly.

"A couple months after we started dating, he started trying to get his hands down my pants. We made out a lot, and he liked to, um, grope my boobs. It was weird at first, but after a little while I liked it. But I wanted to slow down, but he didn't. I thought being without a boyfriend was the end of the world, but my mother told me when I found the guy who was for me, I'd know when I saw him. I'd know the way she knew with my dad. I'd see something in his eyes that said he would never hurt me or do anything to put his needs before mine. It was corny when I heard it six months ago."

She smiles and kisses me again, pressing her lips to mine a little firmer and wrapping her hand around the back of my head.

"It's not corny anymore, Edward," she whispers.

At that instant, even with my hands holding her waist, I try to stop her. "Bella, stop."

She doesn't for a few more kisses, and I lean away, turning my face away again.

"Stop."

Her hands thread through my hair, and chills slip up my spine to her fingertips. She tries to make me look at her again, and when I do, I don't say what she wants to hear.

"Bella, you're young," I say, and she sighs heavily, looking away. "You're beautiful. You have your whole life ahead of you. I can't do this. It's not right. You've only known me a day, and you don't know anything about me."

She doesn't say anything to me for a minute, laying her hands over my shoulders and squeezing my muscles. "My mom only knew my dad for a day when she promised to come back to him after they met at a beach party. But it was enough for them."

"I'm not normal like your father," I inform her, my voice elevated slightly.

"You're good like my father," she tells me a little louder. "I can see it in your eyes and on your face. I just want to know the man who saved us. You owe me that much."

I shake my head, unconsciously grinning. "And that means you have to do this?" I demand incredulously.

"Are you gonna talk to me any other way?"

The longer I sit there entangled in her arms, the more I know I've sat here for too long. And we have to get moving again before anyone spots us.

"Bella," I say softly. "We have to go."

For a minute, she doesn't move, and I hold my hands up in concession. "I'll talk," I promise. "But we have to go. Please."

"First," she says, lifting a finger to my lips, "kiss me."

Her request surprises me, but because I know it will make her do what I need her to do, I lean in around her finger to kiss her cheek.

She catches me before I can touch her cheek, pressing her lips to mine again.

I can't do this. It's wrong.

But I can't stop.

So, Bella being the instigator. Nothing strange about that, right?

Also, try not to jump to too many conclusions here. Not yet.

HEA? Can't say for sure. Let's wait for Aro to meet his demise, and then we'll talk.

Everybody have a great morning, and we'll see you next week!

Later!