But somehow he remembered.
That revelation hit me later. Right there in the bed-and-breakfast the only thing I cared about was that I had iced coffee. I stroked the side of the cup lovingly, the condensation chilling my fingers. “Oh caffeine, how I’ve missed you.”
“It’s a mocha. You said you liked the chocolate flavor,” Cyrus said. I nodded, glad he remembered, but at that point I’d have drunk anything.
I took myself and my pretty cup to the bed and sat on the mattress before bringing the straw to my lips. “Look how pretty you are.”
Cyrus waited in the open space of the room, two hands now cupping his tall take away cup of what had to be warm coffee. Eww. Who drank coffee warm?
I took my first sip of the heavenly brew and moaned when the chocolate caffeinated mess touched my tongue. I was so glad I didn’t die on that ship because I would never have gotten the joy of drinking iced coffee again. You don’t think about those things you’d miss the most.
“I’ve never been jealous of a straw,” Cyrus said, gazing at me.
I shoved the straw in deeper and then bit down with my back teeth, chewing a bit as I sucked up more coffee. “Don’t be. I like to chew on them after the first few sips.”
His face twisted into disgust. It so perfectly conveyed his every thought that I wanted to take a picture of it and uploaded it as a gif.
The ice coffee permeated my system, and slowly my thoughts returned to normal. Who was this man?
Cyrus appeared laid-back, but so much was going on in his brain. He calculated every step. He was fun and approached life like an adventure, but he and his brother had a security team “on retainer” whatever that meant.
They flew us to the airport in a helicopter and then I took a private plane to Pelican Bay. He told me stories that made me believe he was rich, but he left out how money was obviously not an issue. There was rich and then there was I’m best friends with billionaires rich.
Cyrus definitely was in the latter category.
He hadn’t done anything to make me off balance. I just couldn’t get my footing around him. The man saved me from a kidnapping. He’d heard me pee in a corner of our cage, but I didn’t know how to act around him. Everything was different now.
The only thing I was sure of was that he gave me tingles in all kinds of places I’d never been tingly before. The thought of being away from him caused me to stress even when he was only gone a few minutes to the first-floor kitchen to get coffee. I wasn’t ready to admit what it meant, but I had enough 1990s romance movies in my repertoire to take a guess.
“Scalding my tongue on this large doesn’t taste as good anymore,” Cyrus said, taking one last sip from his tall cup of coffee and then placed it on the top of the dresser.
Someone knocked.
The man wore every emotion he felt directly on his face at the exact time he felt it, which meant when they came and knocked on the door, I knew he was annoyed. Cyrus didn’t like intrusions.
Except when he opened it and found his brother and another woman, his face fell into his classic welcoming expression.
The two of them stepped into the room and I smiled at Corbin before taking a quick glance at the woman who held his hand.
“Imogen, this is my girlfriend, Hazel.”
As soon as he finished our introduction, the woman’s face fell into a radiant expression. “We brought you so much stuff. Shopping for other people is fun,” she said, pulling away from Corbin’s hand and handing me a big brown bag with twisted twine handles she carried into the room. “I hope you like what I picked out. Corbin basically only told me that you were a girl, so I didn’t have a lot to go on.”
“Well, I don’t own anything right now, so I’m sure it’s fine,” I said, trying to calm her fears, but it also was the truth. I left my actual scrubs back in the truck stop and my other stuff in North Carolina. All my worldly possessions in that moment included whatever she gave me.
Hazel dumped the bag on the bed unceremoniously, and a bunch of makeup rolled out onto the floor.
“I tried to grab a little of every style just to get you by until you can go shopping for yourself,” she said, bending over to pick up the lipstick tubes and foundation before they rolled underneath the bed.
“Seriously, thank you. I’m not really picky. Normally I wear scrubs.”
She stacked the makeup items on the mattress so they wouldn’t roll away again. “Doctor, nurse, or lab tech?” she quickly listed off all the jobs, and I appreciated that she listed off doctor first. It was super annoying when people assumed I had to be a nurse since I was a woman. Sure, it was true, and I never wanted to be a doctor because they were jerks sometimes, but that didn’t mean I liked the assumption I couldn’t have been a doctor.
“Nurse.”
Hazel smiled at my answer. We glanced back at the two brothers, who were talking in their own little space on the other side of the room. “Great, so enough small talk. Let’s get to the important stuff. So… Cyrus?”
She lifted one of her eyebrows with her question, making me think there was more to it than what she was saying. “Yeah,” I replied tentatively, waiting for her next question.
