“Maybe I am trying to hypnotise myself out of answering.”
Ranger snatched a ragged breath. “That’s not going to work either.”
“No?” I glanced up at the wrong moment. Or the perfect moment, depending on the version of myself I was listening to today.
Ranger’s face was inches from mine. Like it had been a dozen times since we’d kissed on the rug. But we were different people now. Back then, we had laughed, blazing heat at each other aswe’d drifted away from whatever war we’d been fighting at the time.
Now... it was just us and the crackling current between us, and I felt it in places I’d believed were long dead.
Kiss him.
No.
I could not.
But imagining I could was nice for as long as I could bear it.
I retracted my hand. Heart thumping, I tossed him the shirt I’d yanked from his body. “You can sleep in the den.”
Ranger smirked. “That right?”
“Is a problem for you?”
“No, but I was joking when I asked you. I already claimed my space, and it’s non-negotiable.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but life caught up with me and a spasm of pain needled my hip. In the scheme of things, it was not that bad, but it derailed my thoughts, and I remembered the other reason I had come back to the kitchen in the first place.
“Locke is okay?”
Ranger blinked, letting me know that the timing of my question was off. “He’s fine. Enjoying life with his double batch of lovers.”
Nash McGovern and the O’Brian queen. This, I remembered. “But he is well? Other than that?”
“Vik, he’s fine.”
Searching for wheat bread took me away from him, releasing the pressure in my ribcage, but I could not hide from the chill that came from shifting out of his spell. The shiver that rocked me as I took in the bread by the fruit bowl. A dark rye loaf that Ranger would assume radioactive and another paler baton that Katya did not usually bake.
I picked it up. “You will eat this?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“If it’s fucking weird.”
“Is bread, Asher.”
Ranger’s eyes flared as he dropped his shirt on the counter instead of pulling it back on. “When you get bored of deflecting conversation, you’ll have to tell me how you found out.”
“Is simple. Locke told me.”
Ranger peered at the bread while I retrieved a knife to slice it. “Why?”
“It was time. I think. You would have to ask him. I do not remember those moments as much as I want to.”
I sliced the bread and considered what to do with it next. I was not much of a cook, and we had already established that Ranger would not eat anything he did not immediately recognise.
What do English people eat for breakfast?
