I shrugged. “You’re an interesting topic.”
I watched those tan cheeks of hers tint with that gorgeous red, and I wanted to make her do it again.
Maybe on other parts of her body.
Goddamn it, she’s speaking to you. You’re close. Clone her damn phone.
I mindlessly slid my hand into my pocket and pulled out my phone. “Do you have debts you’re trying to pay off?”
“What?” she asked a bit too quickly.
Bingo.
I hit the nail on the head with something.
I stared at the pairing subroutine on my burner phone and hoped that the damned thing wasn’t ancient enough to ruin this. Something told me she wasn’t ready for me to be inside ofher space yet, so I didn’t want to bank on the fact that I’d be in the same space as her. Which was fine. Women, in this day and age, had a fucking right to be nervous with new people, especially men. But I still had a job to do, and we still had people dependent upon us.
So I took a step closer to her and watched as she almost immediately took a small step back.
I tilted my head when she snickered. “Sorry.”
I shook my head softly as I slid my phone back into my pants pocket. With the pairing app running that Ranger put on all of our burner phones, I hoped it would latch on. But he did say it would take some time.
I needed to buy time without making her feel uncomfortable.
“You’re fine, really,” I said as I held my ground.
Her eyes moved to the pocket where my phone was. “Everything okay?”
I chuckled. “I jinxed myself.”
Her eyes whipped back up to mine. Those beautiful caramel brown eyes. “What?”
“We’re here talking about work, and I just got called in.”
“Oh, noooo!” she exclaimed softly before she jutted out that plump lower lip of hers in a little pout. “I was going to show you Stardew Valley.”
I crooked an eyebrow. “Stardew Valley?”
“Yesssss,” she hissed as she dropped the groceries at her feet. She began talking with her hands, and I found that a little more than adorable. “It’s this relaxing farming sim game that’s sort of open world? And you’ve got all of these NPCs that you can romance and marry. And you can have kids, and decorate your farm, and put animals on it, and you can do all sorts of things. Oh! And there’s this place after the main game called Ginger Island, and there’s a whole other farm on there to do stuff with. Plus there’s another cave that you can explore, and it gives youthese striped slime balls that, when you put them in the slime egg hatcher and hatch them? They turn into these cute little tiger-striped slime balls!”
She was fucking adorable when she was excited. “Sounds like a fun game.”
“Oh, I’ve spent days of my life in this damn thing,” she said as she continued on with her hands flapping about. “I’ve got twelve farms made up with each playthrough being tailored to one of the twelve people you can marry in the game? And they all have different personalities and different likes and dislikes, so I’m creating farms around all of them with their favorite things and stuff like that so they can live on the farm of their dreams, you know?”
Her jaw unhinged with such a massive yawn that I no longer felt the need to find an excuse to dip.
She needed sleep.
And when I felt my phone buzz once in my hand, I pulled it out and tilted the phone screen to me.
“Cloning successful,” the screen said.
I slid my phone back into my pocket. “Boss is crawling up my ass, I should go.”
She nodded as she covered her mouth again and yawned. “Jesus, I don’t know how I got so tired.”
I chuckled a bit. “From all that overtime work you take.”
