“Willow told me.”
“She told you too much.”
“She was just trying to make me understand, Gideon. I’m sorry that you lost them. And I’m sorry that I made that time more difficult for you.”
I brake next to the cemetery and turn to face Lena.
“You have to stop apologizing. Youhaveto, Lena. None of it was your fault. My parents dying wasn’t on you. The shooting wasn’t your fault.None of it.I told Willow that she needs to let it go earlier, but you do too. You don’t need to carry around any guilt. Not for me.”
She nibbles that bitable lip and then offers me a smile. “Okay. I won’t apologize anymore. It’s annoying. This is a great place for a cemetery.”
“We thought so too.”
Putting the side-by-side back in gear, I point us toward the house.
“Let’s go look at your loot.”
Chapter Ten
Lena
“I need a sharp knife.”
Gideon’s eyebrow shoots up, and I can’t help but grin at him.He’s so freaking handsome.
“To open the boxes, not for nefarious acts.”
“Box cutter coming up,” he says and opens a drawer in the kitchen that’s obviously a junk drawer. Every home in America has one of these.
Except the White House. But that’s not a normal home.
“Be careful,” he warns me as he passes it to me, and I push the blade out with a triumphant grin. “Seriously.”
“Seriously, I’m twenty-four,” I remind him. “I’ve used a blade before. But maybe stay over there. Just in case. I wouldn’t want to accidentally draw blood.”
He chuckles, and the sound moves through me like music. I can probably count on two hands the number of times I’ve heard this man laugh in all the years that I’ve known him.
If he’d cracked a smile more often, or let out a chuckle like that, I would have been so gone over him, I would have humiliated myself on the daily.
But it was the hug earlier that made the butterflies erupt and my skin prickle, and my freaking vagina do the two-step. Being held byGideon James is an experience that everyone should have at least once in their lives, and yet, if one single woman were to touch him right now, I’d scratch her eyes out.
After I cut her hands off with this box cutter.
“You have a devious grin on that gorgeous face of yours.”
Wait.He thinks my face is gorgeous?
Since when?
“What were you thinking about?” he asks.
“Psh. Nothing.” I slice through the tape of the first box and rejoice when I find three pairs of jeans. “Thank God, denim in my actual size. The ones I’m wearing are about to sever me in half. My ass has grown. I think my kidneys are shutting down. Turn around.”
He lifts a brow. “What?”
“Turn. Around. I have to put these on. Everything else is getting washed before I wear it, but I’m trashing these torturous jeans that I’m wearing immediately. Maybe we’ll burn them. Incinerate them. They deserve it.”
He just stares at me.
