He felt protective.
Possessive.
Those foreign emotions swamped him, along with the desire he’d barely been able to bring to heel since that reckless kiss back in the city. He couldn’t keep his gaze from roaming over her again now, her scent and the vibration of her pulse so near to him driving him mad with need.
She must have sensed it—the low throb that seemed to charge the air between them. The kitchen felt too cramped, too warm. Electric with all of the things Naomi awakened in him.
She swallowed, but didn’t move an inch.
“Anyway,” she said, “the only things that matter to me now are Michael and the kids we’re trying to help. They’re my family now. I would do anything for them.”
“They’re lucky to have you.”
“What about you, Asher?” At first, he wasn’t sure what she was asking. His brows knit in question and she tilted her head at him. “Do you have a family? A bunch of scowling, overbearing brothers like you somewhere out there?”
“I have no family,” he answered tonelessly. That much was true, at least.
“What about Ned? Seeing as he left you his ranch and his dog, you and he must’ve been close.”
Asher didn’t know how to answer that. He’d never considered himself close to anyone. It wasn’t how he was raised. Quite the opposite, in fact. But he had felt gratitude for the kind old widower who opened his home to a stranger, a drifter he had every reason to fear.
But Ned hadn’t been afraid. He’d treated Asher like a person, not a monster. He’d treated him like an equal, not a servant or a tool. He gave Asher his respect. More than that, he’d given him his trust.
“We were . . . friends.” The word felt odd on his tongue because he’d never used it to describe anyone before. “It seems strange here without him sometimes.”
Naomi smiled gently, reaching over to lay her hand atop his. “I’m sorry you lost your friend, Asher.”
The tender sentiment left a pang inside him that felt as unsettling to him as his admission that he missed the old man. Evidently, being around Naomi was a minefield of revelations. Not the least of which being how badly he wanted to take hold of her and feel her body against his.
He wanted to kiss her again, and if she continued to touch him and talk softly about feelings, he was going to go mad. He pulled away from her and stalked over to put Sam’s kibble back in the cabinet.
Behind him, she let go of a sigh. “Do you mind if I get a glass of water?”
“Help yourself. You won’t find me to be much of a host.”
She made an acknowledging noise then padded over to the cupboards and foraged for a glass. She filled it at the sink, then paused in front of the refrigerator to study the collection of curling, yellowed photographs that had been permanently stuck to the metal surface with magnets and old tape long before Asher had arrived on the scene.
“Is that him?” she asked. “The African American man in several of these pictures?”
“Yes, that’s Ned.” Asher stowed the dog food and glanced at the array of faded images. “The woman he’s seated next to on the porch in this photo was his wife, Ruth.”
Naomi looked closer and turned a warm smile on him. “She’s beautiful. Did you know her too?”
“No. She died six years before I came here.”
In the picture was a smiling fifty-something Ned, taken before his short black curls had turned white and his deep brown eyes had gone cloudy and unseeing. He and his tawny-skinned, gentle-eyed wife were seated side-by-side in matching wood rocking chairs. Asher had never seen such contentment in a pair of faces before in his life.
He’d never known such love existed.
“Ned made those chairs himself,” he said when the silence stretched between them. “He told me after Ruth died he put them in the barn out back and couldn’t bear to look at them again because they reminded him of her and everything they lost.”
“How sad.” Naomi glanced at some of the other photos before turning a curious look on him. “How did you two meet, anyway?”
“One night about fifteen years ago, I ended up outside Vegas. Wasn’t much for letting any grass grow under my feet, and I had no idea where I wanted to go next. All I knew at that moment was I’d gone too long without feeding. More than a week, which is further than any of my kind should push it. I ran more than fifty miles before I finally saw signs of civilization. And by that, I mean a rundown gas station and convenience store. Nobody around except an old piece of junk pickup truck sitting at one of the pumps.”
“Ned’s Chevy,” Naomi said with a smile.
Asher nodded. “This old black man shuffled out of the place and went over to start pumping his gas. He knew what I wanted the instant he saw me. Christ, I had to be a sight. My vision was hazy with hunger, and my fangs felt like they were on fire in my mouth. I snarled something at him. I don’t even know what I said. I expected him to run—or try to. I wasn’t there to kill him, but the way my thirst was racking me, he had to know it was a possibility.”
