“Fuck off, Vik. They smell like my nan’s Shake n’Vac.”
Okay. So no oranges, but it bothered me more than I was prepared for that there could be nothing else for him.
“You will not find anything you like in there.”
Ranger glanced over his shoulder. “How do you know?”
“My house is not McDonalds.”
“Your house isn’t fucking real. There’s a bath in Jakey’s bit the size of a parking space.”
“That is your counterargument?”
“Who am I arguing with?” Ranger shut the fridge and rotated to face me with everything I’d predicted bleeding from his criminally attractive face. “It’s a bathtub for fucking llamas. Even Rubi would drown in it.”
“Rubicandrown in it.” I spoke with no malice. I liked the big King with a heart as vast as his mouth. His face was the first I saw when I woke up with the Kings last winter and he had hugged me back to life the moment I’d sat up. “Jake too. Did he send you here to babysit me?”
Ranger leaned against the fridge door, casually curious as he ran that sinful gaze over me, pausing at my waist for whatever reason, before he continued his up and down assessment. “Depends.”
“On?”
“How honest you want me to be. I’m not here to play games, Vik. I can’t be arsed.”
I was still gripping the counter as if it were a life raft that could keep me from drowning in him. I unclenched my fingers and moved closer, feeling the heat of him deeper with every step. “You think I can?”
Ranger shrugged, his flashing gaze the only warning I got before brutal honestly spilled from his mouth. “I think you’re fucked up enough right now thatyoudon’t know what you’re capable of.”
“Get out of my way.”
A pause stretched out before Ranger stepped away from my fridge.
I shut the door and opened a cabinet instead. “Katya keeps the eggs in here so they do not sit in the sun.”
“What does she do when you don’t eat them? Yeet them at the moon?”
“I eat them.”
“When?”
“Specifically?”
Ranger shrugged. “You’re skinny as fuck.”
I gave him a pointed once-over of my own. “Your house is made of glass.”
“Meaning?”
“What do you think it means?”
Ranger made a low sound. I gritted my teeth against it, but it reached me all the same and my hands shook.
He stretched a long arm over my shoulder and took the eggs from me. “I think you talk a lot of shit.”
“You are not hungry then?”
Ranger set the eggs on the counter. Something about the movement seemed off and I allowed myself a moment to truly look at him. Much of Ranger’s skin was covered in the sinister ink that didn’t match the mischief I’d grown used to seeing in his onyx eyes, but enough was visible to show mottled bruises I had not noticed before. On his arms, his throat, and the side of his head. A cut to his eyebrow, his knuckles scabbed and split. “Who did you fight?”
“That’s not breakfast.” Ranger propped a hip against the counter. “And it’s not the conversation we need to have.”
