“Then stop touching me.”
He nips my calf and trails his tongue up my leg, wrapping around to the sensitive skin on the inside of my thigh. I miss the next shot, but the one after hits the tree.
“Good girl. Now put the safety on.”
I do as he says, then scowl at him over my shoulder as he rises. He plucks the gun out of my hand with a wink. “That’s it?” I snap. “You are going to work me up and leave me wanting?”
He shakes his head as his lips twitch. “That is barely scratching the surface of ‘working you up.’”
I huff and stride back toward the shoreline. He follows me with a chuckle, repacks the gun, pulls out a blanket, and lays it across a grassy area in the shade. I drop my ass down on it as he opens the cooler and unpacks an array of refreshments and some sparkling elderflower drink that Helen always has in stock for me.
He hands me a paper plate and nods at the spread. “Help yourself.”
I take a little of each of the snacks he’s packed, marveling at the fact some of these are homemade by him. There are a few spicy things that are one hundred percent for me, given his aversion to things that make his mouth sizzle. It’s a level of thoughtfulness that hooks another chain into my heart and increases his level of dangerousness.
We eat in comfortable silence, both of us staring over the lake, lost in our thoughts. He cleans the empty containers up and puts them in the cooler as they become empty.
“I really like it here,” I murmur.
“The lake? It is stunning.”
“Not just the lake, but here as in Red Lake. Helen, Duke, the town, the people.”You.
“You lived in a city before?”
“I did.”
“You don’t miss the bustle of people?”
I tilt my head. “No. I thought I would, but it’s something I had to experience in order to compare it. Now that I have, I prefer this.”
“I miss the diversity,” he mutters. “But not the coldness.”
“I understand. Living somewhere like Red Lake means you are only an hour from that kind of life. You can take weekend trips to the city and get your fill before coming back to the sanctuary.”
“That is the dream.”
“You don’t miss the military?”
“Again, I miss the diversity—the variety of work, the opportunities to hone my skills. But the bad outweighs the good for me, and that’s why I left.”
“Bodyguarding gave you that diversity?”
“No. It’s not what I thought it was going to be.”
“Things rarely are.”
“What about you, Miss Engineer? What’s your speciality?”
“Nuclear, but I was doing my masters in renewable energy—before him.”
“That’s a very noble career choice.”
“I had plans to help change the world. This country is one of the biggest powerhouses in the world, and we should be leading on climate change.”
“Would you like to go back?”
Would I? It’s not even something I have considered, because you can’t study with a false name. I shrug, not allowingmyself to have hope for a future that is about as likely as winning the lottery. “Perhaps.”
