So while I needed a place to run to in case shit went sideways, I didn’t have the budget for a luxury safe house that was going to sit empty ninety-nine percent of the time.
Which meant that my safe house was in a rural area around Redland, sitting behind several large farms and located on an overgrown plot of land that completely hid the house from view.
If you can call it a house.
That was being pretty generous.
If I were being kind, I might call it a cabin.
But in reality, it was really just a shack.
It was a small one-room shack made of graying wood that likely needed to be replaced. The only luxuries it came with were a septic system and a well.
I’d invested some money to add a solar system that could, theoretically, run the small window air conditioning unit.Though I hadn’t tested that out in practice yet. I was kind of dreading that.
“Should we stop to stock up on some food? We aren’t going to want to be on the road in your car if we can help it.” At my long pause, he studied my profile. “There is a way to cook there, right?”
“There’s a grill out back.”
“Is there a fridge?”
“I put a new one in when I bought the place. But I haven’t checked since. I think it’s safe to assume we can get some food to put in it. If you’re willing to cook it. Otherwise, it’s all salads for us, since that’s the only thing I can reliably make.”
“I can keep us fed,” he assured me as I pulled into a lot at a local market.
Then I just walked alongside the cart as he picked out fruit, vegetables, meat, and some non-perishables.
“What?” he asked, catching me watching him as he loaded up the belt at the checkout.
“I didn’t even know where half that stuff was,” I admitted, waving toward the food. The man even made sure to stop down the coffee aisle to get not only grounds but syrups.
“Spent a lot of time in grocery stores as a kid, trying to figure out how to keep me and my brother fed with as little money as possible.”
I hated that a small version of him was forced into such an adult role. But I loved how effortlessly competent he was as a man. This was not the kind of man who would claim he didn’t know how to properly wash a dish or remember to buy soap before it ran out.
“No, wait,” I called when he walked over to the card terminal. “It’s my house. I’m paying.”
“Absolutely fucking not,” he said, tone casual.
“I like him,” the cashier said, giving me a smile.
I wasn’t going to admit it, but, yeah, I was starting to like him too. Way more than felt right after such a short period of time.
It didn’t hurt that I’d gotten the best nap of my life while asleep on his lap. And it hadn’t escaped me that when I woke up, his fingers were still on my head. Almost like he’d been rubbing my scalp the whole time I’d been asleep.
Just the idea of that, whether it was true or not, made my belly feel all wobbly.
“He even knows how to pack the bags,” the cashier said, pulling me out of my thoughts. “Girl, he’s a keeper.”
“No one likes crushed bread,” Caymen said, shrugging as if that was the most common piece of knowledge ever. Well, I had about five dozen grocery delivery drivers who never got that memo.
“What?” he asked again as we loaded the groceries into the trunk. Well, I stood by and watched because he’d batted my hand away when I tried to help.
“This whole… knowing how to be a functioning adult thing… it’s hot.”
“It’s hot that I know how to load groceries?”
“Absolutely.”
