“Can we sit with you?”
He nods at her careful question from the hallway. “Suit yourself.”
They take up the green pleather chairs across from him, avoiding eye contact but doing a decent job of inhaling their food.
“This is good. Thank you again,” Addison says.
“It’s nothing.”
“You said you grew up here. Can I ask when you left?”
He cringes internally. He never said he grew up here. She inferred that herself. “Are we playing twenty questions now?”
“No. No, sorry. You don’t have to answer. I talk too much, always have.”
He wanted them to come out, and now he can’t have a proper conversation without making her feel like he’s scolding her.
Knowing a few things about him won’t matter. They won’t be around long enough to use it against him. “I’ve been away for a long time. Working up in Alaska.”
Her brows arch. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Doing what, exactly?”
Flying a charter plane, almost falls out of his mouth before he remembers that he doesn’t know her from a rotter on the street. “Hunting. Fishing. Tourist ferries. Not much to do up there except transport the idiots dumb enough to vacation at the top of the world.”
“Did you enjoy it? Other than your clients being idiots, of course?”
He nods, remembering how peaceful it had been up there before the shit hit the fan. “Yeah, I did.”
There’s something else on the tip of her tongue that she wants to ask him, and he leans forward half an inch before catching himself. Maybe she thinks better of it, shaking her head almost imperceptibly before the room falls silent again, leaving him to wonder what it could have been.
“You got anyone else you’re looking for? Waiting on? Other than your husband and his seven brothers?” Wyatt asks.
She reddens a shade at how he calls out her previous lie, as if he has any place judging a liar when he’s already told her half a dozen of them. “No one else. You?”
He shrugs. “No one left alive.”
“I’m sorry.”
No one left alive because he was too fucking late in getting to his ex-wife, he thinks bitterly. There’s a burn at the edges of his eyes that irritates him enough to drop his fork on the plate with a clatter.
The way the others jump in unison is like a slap back to the reality of their situation, and he softens his voice in silent apology. “I, um, saw some goats. Back there.”
“You didn’t have them before?”
He shakes his head.
Addison forces a smile. “A few of them faint. Be careful if you go back there to see them. We’ve already toppled a few by mistake.”
“Toppled?”
“I am not joking in the slightest.”
Well, now he’s curious about these fainting goats, but that’s a mission for another day.
“This isn’t chicken,” the kid says suddenly.
