“Actually, I did have a reason for watching you from the door,” he said.
“Oh?”
“It’s snowing, so we can't go outside, but I wanted to know if you wanted to hang out.” Damn, he felt like a teenager all over again, asking Rose if she wanted to spend time with him, but he craved her company more than he craved air to breathe, so he shoved aside those feelings he’d thought he’d long since outgrown.
“Show me something you used to enjoy from before. Before my brother messed with your head and your body, back when you were just a regular guy,” Rose blurted out.
Not what he’d been expecting her to say, but since she hadn't told him to get lost, he could work with it. An idea immediately popped into his head, something he could share with Rose that he’d never shared with anyone else, not any of his friends or girlfriends before, and not his team.
“You know most people tell the other person where they’re going before they storm out of a room,” Rose called after him as he strode for the door.
“Most people follow when they’ve just asked someone to share with them,” he shot back with a smirk.
“Except you never actually said you would share anything with me, you just turned and walked away,” Rose grumbled, but she came to trail after him as he headed out of the library and down to the office.
They had a main office they used for plotting their revenge. The walls were covered in dozens of photos, piles of paperwork were stored on a desk, and they had a huge conference table where they’d set themselves up when they worked. That room was too busy for what he had planned, too hard, and cold, a reminder of why he’d brought Rose here and that she could leave when they all had what they wanted. Ridge Gardner dead.
So he went to the smaller office, which was rarely used, but it had what he needed, although he could tell Rose had no idea what he was up to when he went to a filing cabinet and opened it.
“Perfect,” he said when he found what he’d been looking for and spun around to see Rose staring at him with a furrowed brow.
“Paper?”
“For origami.”
“Origami? That’s what you wanted to show me?”
“I learned from my grandmother when I was a boy. Her first husband was Japanese, but they were married for only a year before he tragically died in a house fire, saving two little neighbor children.”
“Did they live? The children?”
“They did. He was the love of my grandmother’s life, although I know she loved my grandfather, too. They only had one son, and they lost him too soon as well. My dad died when I was too young to remember him. My sister was ten years older than me, so she helped my mom raise me, especially after my mom got sick. They’re all gone now.”
“I'm sorry, Steel, I know it sucks not to have a family, but at least you got to enjoy them while you had them,” Rose said softly.
He knew he’d been lucky to have a family that loved him and cared about him. Rose hadn't had that at all. She’d been raised by a psychopath who got off on inflicting pain on her.
No more.
No one would ever hurt her again.
She was his now, and he protected what was his.
“Want to learn how to make a rose?”
She chuckled but nodded. “I’d love to. I’ve never done origami before. Ridge didn't believe in anything that wasn't studying and work.”
“We can learn more after this if you want, but origami takes a lot of practice to get right.”
“Lucky I'm a patient girl then.”
“Lucky,” he agreed with a chuckle. “We’ll do it together.”
Grabbing stacks of paper, he headed through to the dining room so they could spread out at the table. Once they were both seated with a piece of square red paper in front of them, he started giving instructions.
It had been a long time since he’d done origami, and he was definitely out of practice, but as he talked Rose through it, everything began to come back to him. Roses had been his grandmother’s favorite because they were the first thing her husband had ever made for her, and they’d been the first thing she’d taught him, even though there were simpler ideas to start with.
His grandmother always told him that anything worth doing wasn't just worth doing well, it was worth jumping all in with.
