Jitter lifts his head and licks Grey’s face.
His whole face.
The whole damn thing.
Instead of grimacing and shoving him away though, Grey half smiles and rubs Jitter behind the ears. “Knock it off, pup. I’m fine.”
Still not looking at me.
I sink to the carpet and cross my legs, watching him. “So, Super Villain Man?”
He sighs and swipes his face. “You’re fired.”
“You’re gonna have to put moreoomphbehind that for me to believe it.”
“Fine. You’re not fired. But please go home.”
“With or without my dog?”
“Leave him here.”
My heart melts into a puddle of sappy, gooey, warm puddles of lovey-dovey crap that I absolutely do not have the bandwidth for.
I pull my knees to my chest and loop my arms around them, watching him not watch me while he loves on my dog, who’s attempting to climb in the man’s lap again. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Those hooded blue eyes lift and meet my gaze head-on, and my stomach drops like I’m on the best of the best roller coaster. “You have a code.”
“I have to, or I can’t live with myself.”
His focus on me doesn’t waver, and my arms break out in goosebumps.
So intense.
And I like it.
I likehim.
Despite every reason I shouldn’t, despite all of my own misgivings about likinganyone, I like him.
He feels like a friend.
A complicated friend, buta friend.
“My best friend and business partner shoved a paper in front of me and told me it was a purchase authorization for a new piece of lab equipment I’d mentioned wanting to acquire,” he says. “It was the authorization to sell off a research project I’d put six years of my life into and a commitment to send the next ten years’ worth of my research directly to a start-up that he’d bought into. I have a code too. It’s simple.Don’t fucking lie to make money off of someone else. And I’ve addedread all of the fine print. Anddon’t trust people.”
It takes everything I have to not launch myself over my dog and hug him.
The thing I’ve learned about people is that they’re never all good or all bad.
Chandler?
He’s on my permanent shit list because he betrayed me, butI get it. His parents have had issues since the dawn of their relationship, and they continuously one-upped each other in gifts and experiences to him instead of being a family unit, giving him an inflated sense of self-worth constantly battling with an inflated sense of guilt. They fucked him up, but it’s on him if he ever wants to be the kind of person who deserves my time again.
Emma?
She has given people the benefit of the doubt her entire life, and she’s been taken advantage of. Laney and I have fended off the worst of what we could whenever we’d see someone taking advantage of her sweet nature, but we—I—failed her at her own wedding.
Laney?
