“Nothing is wrong.”
“I can see it on your face,” he claimed in that rough voice, taking a step forward.
I pressed my lips together and let myself blink twice, quickly. When my voice came out like an almost whisper and it was huskier than normal, I tried not to let the frustration show on my face. “It’s nothing you need to worry about,” I tried to tell him.
And just likethat, his face clouded over and he took another step toward me. “I wanna worry about it. Tell me what’s wrong.”
He—
I felt my nostrils flare. Felt myself press my lips tighter together, and I blinked even more. Keep it together.Keep it together.“Rip, it has nothing to do with work. I didn’t mess up.”
His eyes moved over my face even more, and he took yet another step closer, that frown not goinganywhere. “What happened?”
With my free hand, I reached up and did pinch my nose that time, letting myself close both my eyes briefly before they decided to betray me like everything and everyone else in my life, apparently.
Stop.
I was fine. None of this was worth crying over. I was okay.
“I didn’t get any sleep is all,” was all I could get out, and even to me, it sounded like I was full of it.
Rip breathed, and I didn’t need to look to know he was even closer to me than he had been a moment before. “Why?”
He wasn’t going to drop this. Okay. All right.
I wasn’t going to cry. I could just tell him. Quick like a Band-Aid. Rip it off.“My house—”
And, I was going to cry. Yep. There was no denying it.
“What happened to your house?” he asked slowly.
My voice wavered like a flag on a windy day. “It got broken into.” There. I said it. I had survived it. “They stole some things, tore up other things…” I had to stop again after that. My nostrils flared, and I pinched my nose again, opening my eyes. “I’m a little upset about it.”
I tried to smile, but it immediately toppled over.
One of Rip’s hands went to scratch at his forearm through the material of the coveralls he had on, but his eyes stayed on me. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and even his voice was off as he asked, “They fucked up your things?”
I nodded, keeping my lips together.
A nerve in his cheek started to tick. “Bad?”
All I could do was shrug and hold my breath.
“How bad?”
I bit the inside of my cheek and didn’t bother curbing my croak of, “Bad.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed again, and his head ticked to the side. His hand came up and he scrubbed his cheek with the back of his hand. Rip’s voice was tight. “How’d they get in?”
Tension filled my entire soul as I thought about all the things those jerks had taken from me, not physically but... “They kicked in the door.”
“You call the cops?”
I nodded.
One teal eye narrowed, and I couldn’t miss the low anger in his voice as he asked, “Who went into the house for you?”
“The cops.” The more I talked about it, the worse it got. How had I thought I would get through the day?
