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Becca snorted. “Do I look like the gun type?”
“You never know,” he said.
He stood there, nodding aimlessly, an awkward silence stretching out for a few seconds between them. Becca found it a little strange. Ripper always walked around like he owned the place, wherever he was, but now, he seemed a little hesitant and almost reluctant to speak.
Becca had just opened her mouth to say something, to try to break the strange silence, when her phone buzzed in the pocket of her robes. She dug it out and saw that a text had come in from Griz.
Her blood ran cold when she read the text.
Don’t trust Ripper.
“Who is it?” Ripper asked.
“Um, it’s… Kate,” Becca said quickly. “At the hospital, running late as usual.”
“Oh.”
She forced her panic down and made her fingers move quickly, typing outHe’s here nowbefore she tucked her phone away, as if she thought Ripper might grab it out of her hands and demand to look at it. She jammed her hands into the pockets of her robe, mostly to hide how they were starting to shake.
She was here alone with Ripper. Now that Griz knew, he’d be on the way top speed, she was sure, but who knew how long it might take him to get here?
In the meantime, she was trapped here, alone, with a man twice her size. A killer.
“Hey, uh, want some coffee?” she said, mostly for something to say.
“Sure.”
She wandered into the kitchen, trying to keep the buzzing in her nerves from spinning out of control. She just had to buy some time, that was all. Buy some time, until Griz could get here and take care of this.
And if Ripper caught on that she knew what was up? Or if he had come here planning to kill her all along? What then?
“It’ll just be a minute,” she said loudly, so that Ripper would hear her in the living room.
She looked over her shoulder to make sure that he wasn’t there. A weapon. She needed a weapon in case he tried something.
But what? The carving knives were right there, but she couldn’t exactly play off ignorance if she walked back in to the living room with a coffee pot in one hand and a butcher knife in the other.
The little knife, though, the paring knife. That might work. She could slide that up the sleeve of her robe, pretend like she was keeping her hands up her sleeves to keep them warm.
But could she do it? Could she actually stab him if it came to that?
You can if it’s life or death, Griz had told her in the cabin.And this is.
It was starting to look like that had been a dress rehearsal for right now.
“I take it black,” Ripper said from the living room. “Don’t go to any trouble.”
“Okay,” she said, sliding the paring knife carefully up her sleeve.
“Have you talked to Griz lately?”
“Um, I mean earlier tonight,” she said. “Before he left for…”
She stopped herself. The last thing she should let Ripper know is that she and Griz had discussed the cartel connection.
“…for whatever it is he’s doing,” she finished lamely.
“How’s that coffee coming along?”
