~ 29 ~
PEYTON
“And I’m telling you, cereal isnotpart of ‘breakfast for dinner’. That’s just not a thing.”
Ripley rolled his eyes at me, than jammed the spoon back into his smirking mouth. He was making overly loud crunching noises now. On purpose.
“Eggs, yes. Pancakes, waffles? Absolutely. Even toast,” I conceded. “But cereal…”
“Cereal’s one of the main food groups now,” Ripley said, matter-of-factly.
“Is not.”
“Is too.”
God, it was like fighting with an older brother! Only he wasn’t a brother at all. He was this shirtless, tattooed monstrosity, whose biceps and triceps flexed every time he brought the spoon back and forth to his mouth.
That, plus I was about three bites away from jumping his bones.
Swallowing my frustrations, I pulled the box from the table and began reading it aloud.
“Sugar. Sodium. High Fructose corn syrup…” I laughed. “This shit’s on the bottom of the food pyramid, I’m sure.”
“Nah, it’s at the top now,” he teased. “They inverted it. Look it up.”
The lights overhead flickered, momentarily. Ripley’s eyes shot upward, as he paused mid-bite.
“Cereal is poison,” I pressed. “Admit it.”
He shrugged. “Not if you put fruit in it. Then it becomes healthy.”
We were alone for once, our villa surrounded by the darkness outside. The others had waited a few hours after sunset before sneaking off on different missions. Colson was meeting a local about setting up new identities. And Theo needed some hardware, to build something he called a ‘partial leak trigger.’
Right now, it seemed, insurance was all we really had.
“Do you know how they process these grains?” I shook the box at him. “They get bleached down, then extruded into—”
The lights flickered again, and this time they threatened to go out. Ripley set the cereal bowl down immediately.
“That’s new,” he murmured.
“Hey, it’s Belize,” I shrugged. “Maybe someone plugged in a curling iron.”
Then something popped… and the lightsdidgo out.
“Stay here,” he ordered.
“I amnotstaying here.”
The look he gave me was deadly serious. “Peyton—”
“I’m not kidding,” I reiterated. “You’re not sidelining me during my own crisis.”
He grunted like a bear. Again, it was sexy.
“Fine. But stay behind me.”
A huge arm crossed my body as he crouched low, stepping in the direction of the beach. Ripley moved like a cat, stalking its prey with predatory focus. We were halfway to the doorway when we heard it: an unmistakably insect-like, high-pitched, whine.
