“True enough.” He stared at me for a few seconds, tilting his head to the side. “Are you okay?”
“Of course.”
“Oakley.”
I sighed and ran a hand over my shaved hair. “Yeah, I’m okay. Just need to shower about a hundred times to get his scent off me.”
He nodded. “There’s a shower at the safe house. He’ll be out for a while, so you can get cleaned up once we’re there. Our position hasn’t been compromised, so you can bring your bag in from the car, yes?”
We’d packed our bags and kept them in our car, just in case we’d needed to hightail it out of there, but luckily, that wasn’t the case.
I nodded. “Yep.”
“Alright. Follow me.”
I gave him a nod and headed over to our car, getting into the driver’s seat.
Once Roman and I were both good to go, he pulled out in front of me in Porter’s car, and I followed him in ours.
As I walked out of the bathroom, rubbing a towel over my head, I caught sight of Roman in the makeshift kitchen, cutting up an apple. He popped a piece in his mouth, and I couldn’t look away as he quietly chewed and worked. He was only in a t-shirt now, so I could see plenty of his arm muscles, and as usual, all I could think about was licking him.
Mmm. I wonder if he has any juice from the apple around his lips. I could suck it up and pull him in for a long, lingering, amazing kiss as I grab his ass and—
“Feeling better?”
I blinked at him, not comprehending the question.
“Oak? You okay?”
Shaking myself out, I nodded. “Yep, yeah. Fine. I’m fine.” I snapped my lips shut because I sounded anything but fine.
He stared at me and slowly nodded for a moment. “Right. Um, did the shower help?”
“Oh yeah, for sure. I feel much better now that I washed the sleazeball off.”
“Good. Come eat a snack, and then we’ll go wake him up.”
I nodded and headed over to the kitchen counter where he slid a bowl of fruit over to me. Normally, I wouldn’t eat this late, but this was a sweet gesture, and once I started eating, my stomach decided it was really hungry, and I devoured the fruit in only a few minutes.
“Thank you for that,” I mumbled around my last bite.
“Anytime.” Roman sent me a sweet smile that I didn’t usually see on his face.
He tended to be kind of serious when we were out in public, but behind closed doors and with our friends and family, he was much more relaxed and smiled and laughed more often.
And when it was just the two of us, an even sweeter side came out. He did things like cut up fruit for me all the time, and he always had that gentle smile on his face that made his eyes glitter beneath the light.
It made my stomach swoop with butterflies every time.
After staring at me for a long time, Roman cleared his throat and gestured to the back room. “Ready to wake him up?”
I nodded my agreement, cleaned up my mess, and followed him to a room in the back of the house that we’d set up just forthis purpose. The one window in the room had steel bars on it that were strong enough to keep a dragon inside, and there was nothing else in the room except a chair bolted down and a big steel ring in the cement floor, as well as a few rings around the room on the walls in case we wanted to hook his restraints to a different area.
Plus, it kinda made the room look scarier, which could be a bonus.
Right now, Barney Porter was firmly tied to the chair, and his wrists and ankles had manacles around them. There was a chain connecting his wrists to each other, as well as his ankles, and then a long chain ran from them to the big ring cemented into the floor.
It had taken Roman and me a few days to get everything situated in the room because we wanted to make sure that no one, not even a half-cyclops, could escape from it. We’d also used some spells supplied by Tan—my stepfather, for lack of a better word—and a few of the Ellwoods, so there really was no hope for the man.
