Huh.
What?
Keep me posted. Hudson’s tight-lipped.
Because Lake is a client. Will do. Don’t get sunburned and you better send me a postcard from the Bahamas.
I smiled.Keep the place running, Si. Love you.
Love you too, Cook. Now go cook.
I chuckled. Everyone outside of my immediate family called me Cook. I was almost never Jack to anyone, even though I didn’t have preference.
I carefully took my black chef’s jacket out of the bag and shook it out before hanging it to the closet to straighten. As casually dressed as I was, that jacket was my work uniform now, and I wore it with pride.
“Cook? Wanna come see the kitchen?” Halley called from somewhere in the narrow hallway that was barely wide enough for my shoulders.
She called all the yacht galleys kitchens just to annoy me, but I let it go. It was all the same for me anyway, but they were definitely galleys and not kitchens if you were pedantic about it.
“Coming!” I closed the closet door and got my metaphorical chef’s hat on. I tied my long hair back with a bandanna and smiled. Bahamas, here we come!
Chapter 3
Rey
All in all, I liked the rescue so far.
Everyone was really nice, nobody made a big deal out of me being stuck indoors by my own brain, and I had pretty much been able to go everywhere in the house. Except close to the big windows in the living room or the left side of the hallway upstairs.
There was just so much sky outside. Like…how did that much sky even make sense? I would’ve never thought tall buildings were comforting, but they really were; I knew that now.
One day in late May, Lake and River went to Joliet to do some shopping. That left me alone in the house while everyone else—meaning Theo and Sierra, who I adored already—worked outside at their respective jobs. Except Sierra was technically inside, because she worked from the low office building I had spied through the windows.
Sierra was sort of a big sister type: kind of protective and friendly, and positive in a way that didn’t make it feel fake. Believe me, I’d met enough fake positivity to last a lifetime.
But the guys weren’t at home, and I’d been spot cleaning wherever I could. I actually enjoyed cleaning, even though I knew it was originally a stress reaction. Hell, at this point I thought maybe if I couldn’t clean, I’d get worse with my PTSD. Not that the guys knew about that. I guess they assumed, but agoraphobia wasn’t necessarily a direct line into “oh, he must have PTSD.”
Anyway, there wasn’t much to do, so I’d cleaned what I could and then grabbed yet another book from Ruth’s office where she’d had all these horse-related books. There was a lot of fiction, of course, but that made sense because there were horses in the stories she wrote herself. What drew me into the office were the non-fiction ones.
There were genuine biographies of famous horses—who knew that was even a thing—and so many others on horse behavior, training, health, feeding, and so on.
Something about horses just caught my interest, and so I started to read the books one by one, based on what looked interesting.
I was sprawled on my bed, reading about a guy who tamed wild mustangs when I heard the front door close downstairs.
“Rey?” Theo called.
I left the book behind and went to the landing, wondering what he needed me for.
“Yeah?”
Theo looked like his usual gruff, no-nonsense self, standing there in his work gear of jeans and a T-shirt layered with a flannel. “Have you had lunch yet?”
I shook my head and some of my chin length hair flopped forward from the hood I had up. I really liked Lake’s hoodie, okay?
“Well, come keep me company; we’ll scavenge for whatever’s left.”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just turned to walk into the kitchen. Okay then. Lake seemed to like him a lot and he was a good guy; it was just that he was a stranger still in some ways.
