I leave the door open and follow him toward the staircase. It’s a handful of steps for him to sink onto the top, and I sit beside him. We’re two flights up, and it’s quiet downstairs.
“Hunter, is something wrong?” I ask him when he does nothing but frown down at his gray sweatpants-covered knees.
“Everyone has gone into work,” he says, angling his body to face me. “We can’t all take the day off together, but I’m staying with you at the house today.”
From my first day working at the diner, I never got the impression that they were rich. Their clothes are casual, and this farmhouse is cozy and simple, so that they’ve discussed this and decided to use their PTO to keep me safe isn’t fair to them. They can’t have that much personal time off as construction workers, and with the condo almost finished, their bosses must need them on site every day. I thought Elias staying with me yesterday was a onetime thing, not a pattern of the days to come. It sounds an awful lot like they’ve worked out a schedule to babysit me.
“Thanks, but you don’t have to do that,” I tell him with a smile. “I’d be fine here alone. Promise.”
I have never told such a big, flaming lie in my life.
I’d be terrified being thirty minutes away from town, where no one would hear me scream, even with a fancy security system that Knox can access the external camera through an app on his phone. I wouldstillbe thirty minutes away from help if I needed it, and I don’t have a car after Derek torched mine. If Derek found me here, he could do a lot of damage, maybe even kill me, before anyone got back to help me.
Unless thereisa panic room or a cupboard full of guns Knox didn’t tell me about. Not that a gun would be helpful. Knox couldload me down with guns, Rambo-style, and I’d wind up shooting a hole through my foot because I never learned how to fire a gun.
“It’s fine. And it won’t be us all the time,” Hunter says with a smile. “On the days we all have to be at work, you’ll have a deputy sitting in a patrol car outside in case Derek shows his face.”
Yeah, that’s even worse. Now I’m pulling a cop away from his job when he could be out saving someone’s life.
“That sounds really boring for him. Maybe I could go sit in the police station then?” I suggest. “Or I could hang out in Nico’s office in the diner.” Both of which sound boring to me, but at least I’m not pulling anyone away from anything important, and I can take a book to read for entertainment.
He bounces his shoulder against mine. “The sheriff has two deputies. Lawrence would only sit inside the police station waiting for a call if he weren’t sitting outside watching the house. Stop feeling guilty.”
“I’m not feeling guilty,” I lie.
He gives me a long look that conveys just how good he is at reading me.
“Okay, maybe I’m feeling alittleguilty,” I concede.
“You aren’t inconveniencing anyone. Keeping you safe is something we all want to do, Lawrence included, and the best place to do that is here, away from town, where we will see your ex coming before he can finish getting out of his car.”
When he puts it like that, it’s hard to argue. “Would it be okay to take snacks out to Lawrence when he’s parked outside? Or maybe he could wait inside instead of sweating in his car? I know it doesn’t getthathot in Iowa in the fall, and he’s not a dog or anything so he could always pop a window, but if he’s watching over me, he might as well do it comfortably on the couch with a cool drink in his hand and the TV on.”
Hunter peers down at me, the corners of his eyes creasing in a smile. “You’re real sweet, Maisie Lucas. I keep asking myself how I can be this lucky that you’re sitting next to me and not some other guy.”
My stomach flips, and I feel the tops of my ears heat as I look away. “No, I’m not.”
He gives me another gentle shoulder bump. “How about we leave the deputy in his patrol car, huh? I wouldn’t want him stealing you away from me when I’m not around.”
My eyes snap to him. “You sound?—”
“Jealous? Damn right I am. You might prefer a cop over a construction worker. But that’s not what I came up here to talk to you about.”
My mind flashes back to what happened between us in the kitchen this morning, and the reason I spent the last hour hiding out in my room.
He regrets it.
He’s here to tell me it was a onetime thing that will never happen again. Why else would he look at my bed as if he was imagining us having sex on it and then back away as if he was facing down a ghost?
Plastering a fake smile on my face, I get to my feet. “That’s okay. I understand.”
He circles my wrist and tugs me back. “Nope. Not what you’re thinking.” Releasing me with a sigh, he studies me with a seriousness I wasn’t expecting. “Wyatt is going to kick my ass for doing this, but we keep arguing about it and getting nowhere, so I figure I’ll take his pissy mood over tiptoeing around shit and just say what I’m thinking.”
“Say what?”
“None of us wants to take the Florida job.”
I frown. “Because it’s a bad job?”
