Page 3 of Chosen By the BRATVA Grump

She’s gone thirty seconds later, out the door so fast Jasper has to open it or watch her go through the glass.

He lets it swing shut and looks at me.

I look right back and lift my hand, my meaning clear. What was that about?

“No idea, cousin,” he says before looking across Delilah and lifting a brow. She simply raises one shoulder in a half-shrug and grins.

“What?” I ask Delilah.

She picks up her coffee. “I was going to say you nearly put her through the counter.”

“She’s breathing, isn’t she?”

She flickers her eyebrows at me and sips her coffee, swallows. “You’ll need to be here at seven tomorrow morning. There are ten trays of cinnamon swirl pastries to take across.”

“Fine,” I mutter. “So you don’t need me this evening?” I say this to Jasper, who is still looking at me weirdly.

“No, I suppose not.”

I nod to Delilah, who is still smirking, then head out of the cafe. Unable to ignore the meow that gets fired at me from the ginger cat making circles on the table, I scratch its chin. That one likes a lot of fuss.

I have every intention of going straight to my car and going back to my apartment in the city, but I make the fatal error of looking across to the gallery. It’s after six, and she is still in there, preparing for tomorrow.

My feet are moving before I’ve even sent them the message. The door is unlocked, and this fact annoys me. Anyone could walk in here with nefarious reasons. She is five-feet-five of curvy sweetness and not an ounce of strength to fight a person off.

She’s at the top of the stepladder with a pencil in her teeth and one shoe half hanging from the back of her foot.

“Delilah,” she says around the pencil, “if that’s you, I need you to tell me honestly whether the card is straight under the Ren. I have looked at it so many times, it’s stopped even being a shape and melted into the wall.”

“It’s not Delilah.”

She turns around too fast. The ladder trembles, and I cover the distance in two seconds, catching her as she falls sideways.

“Oh,” she says, from her position cradled in my arms. The pencil falls out of her mouth. “Hi. Hello. You’re in my gallery.”

“Your door was open.”

“It was?” She looks toward it, genuinely confused. “That’s not, okay, that’s not great. Are you going to lecture me? You have a lecturing face.”

“No.” I lower her to the floor and instantly miss the weight of her in my arms. “It seems like it isn’t a usual occurrence. I am going to lecture you about ladder safety, though.”

“It’s fine, you just startled me.” She slides her shoe back on as she says this, which must have fallen off entirely during the fall. Her toenails are painted pale yellow.

“You could have broken something, or cracked open your head.”

She looks at me over the rim of her glasses. “I wouldn’t have fallen if you hadn’t startled me.”

I want to argue with her. Not to be rude or cruel, but because I want to hear her voice.

“I came to check you were okay,” I say, noticing she removed her cardigan. Her dress is pink with white stripes and emphasizes her curvy body far too much.

“Oh,” she says, and I swear she blushes, but I’m starting to wonder if I’m just imagining it because I want her to blush. “That’s nice of you, I’m fine, really.”

I walk past her, looking at the walls, because if I keep standing this close to her I’m going to do something she hasn’t agreed to.

The painting is big. A field, or something arranged to make you think field until you’ve looked for a while, going up toward a gap in the cloud.

She comes and stands beside me. She’s quiet for the first time since I walked in, and I understand that she’s letting me have it without commentary, which is a discipline I wouldn’t have credited her with.