There was an answer to his surly statement, but Lida distracted me, bumping my leg with her nose.
“You want to go out?”
I spoke in Russian and Lida moved to the glass doors.
They were locked, the security system engaged. I pressed my thumb to a keypad that was disguised as a light-switch and nowhere near the door. In front of Ranger, as I could only assume that if he was already here that Jake had given him everything.
How did you know, brother? How did you know that I would have killed anyone else you sent to protect me?
I’d never told Jake what had happened with Ranger. I’d never confessed how my heart skipped a beat every time I saw him. Or how, when I’d been certain I would die against a grimy concrete wall, his face had kept me breathing.
His savage stare.
His dirty laugh.
His soft lips.
The door opened. Lida strolled out and sniffed the air, her stance relaxed enough for me to know there was nothing amiss in the groves.
She would not go far. I moved back to the counter.
Ranger sipped his coffee, not eating.
“It is that bad?”
He shrugged. “It’s enough for two. Come here.”
“Where?”
“Here.” Ranger crooked two fingers,beckoningme to his side as if it did not occur to him for a single moment that I would refuse.
He was a smarter man than me.
With a sigh, I rounded the counter and went to where he lounged on a stool, stopping a foot away, only for him to wrap a long leg around both of mine and draw me closer.
“You are a spider now?”
“Nah, just lazy.” Ranger placed ham and eggs onto the buttered bread I had laid on his plate. He cut a piece in half and held it out. “Don’t make me eat alone.”
My stomach rolled, but Ranger was irresistible. I took the bread and watched him take a bite of his piece. Let him pin me with a stare that did not relent.
“Just eat a little bit.” His spare hand drifted to my damaged hip. “Then you can show me around.”
“You do not seem like someone who does not know their way around.”
“I know where the guns are, Vik. That doesn’t make a home.”
No. The affection he was forcing on me, whatever the motivation, the warmth in his touch, that was what made being alive right now tolerable. I still could not eat, though. I would die.
“Just a little bit,” he whispered. “Please?”
It was my nature to be adaptable, even if I did not consciously accept that Ranger was in my house, force-feeding me breakfast. That any of this was more than a dope binge gone wrong.
It was not a binge.
Semantics. I did not deserve the reward fate was bestowing on me now. I did not deservehim.
I took a small bite of the bread and I did not die. I chewed slowly, swallowing as I tried to catch up with everything that had happened to bring me to the magical place where I was wrapped in Ranger’s long limbs, while he studied me as if I was the only soul on earth he’d ever cared about.
