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Maybe he just liked being close to work.
"How do you take it?" he asked, back to me, pouring coffee into mugs.
"Milk if you have it." To that, he turned, brow quirked up. "What?"
"No fancy shit?"
"Didn't imagine you had sugar-free caramel syrup just laying around."
"Not caramel, but I got..." he reached up into a cabinet, shuffling things around before coming back with two bottles, "toasted almond and... fuck... blueberry?" he declared with a weird inflection, face scrunched up.
"I'll take blueberry," I said on a smile.
"Seriously?"
"Yeah."
"In coffee?"
"No, in my soup. Yes, in my coffee. That's what we're talking about, right?"
"Caramel, mocha, almond... get that. Fruit in coffee? That's some weird chick shit," he said as put a few drips into my coffee with the milk I requested, stirred, then handed it to me.
"Why do you have it if you don't drink it?" I asked, taking a sip.
"Sisters," he said, shrugging as he leaned against the counter, holding his mug by the top despite the steam coming out of it. "They come over, drop off food shit like they live here so they can have what they like when they visit."
"Is that frequent?" I asked, not wanting to fall into awkward silence.
"A little too."
"How many sisters?"
"Two."
"They're younger, right?" I asked.
"How'd you know?"
"You have that... tone people use about little sisters... like you're both annoyed but charmed by them."
"Do you have little sisters?"
"No," I said, inwardly cringing at the finality of my tone.
He picked it up too, brows drawing slightly together. "So, Elsie with no little sisters, you going to tell me what you were doing out on the street at this hour, pissing off Third Street guys?"
"Who said I pissed them off? Maybe they're just jerks who chase girls down the street."
"Maybe, but the way you're evading answering me says otherwise."
"How do you know those guys?" I countered, lifting my chin a little.
His smile was at once devilish and charming and I felt the tiniest twinge of desire spark through my system. "Smart girl," he said, shaking his head.
"How so?" I mean, I was smart, but he couldn't possibly know that.
"You picked up on the fact that I don't want to talk about that particular connection like you don't want to talk about your involvement with them, so you brought it up."
"So we're agreed- we can both keep our secrets."
"Sure, but babygirl, a little advice..." he paused, crossing the kitchen toward me, completely taking up all my space as we came almost toe-to-toe. "Whatever you are doing involving them, stop. Immediately. You're pretty. You're smart. It would be a shame for you to end up in a casket."
Well hell. I had been sort-of trying to convince myself that the guys weren't that dangerous. Stupid, I know. But I needed to believe I could deal with them, that I could fix things. And to believe that, I needed to think there was a way to reason with them or, at the very least, work around them without getting into too much trouble. Being chased, well, I could have maybe convinced myself that they wanted to stop me and figure out what I was doing. They might figure out I wasn't a threat and just let me go.
But with Paine telling me that they would apparently have no qualms about killing me, well, it made it impossible to pretend ignorance of the danger.
"Elsie," his smooth voice said, making my head snap up automatically. "Whatever it is, get out of it," he said, his hand raising and snagging some of the large amount of hair that had fallen out of my ponytail whilst running. He tucked it behind my ear, brushing the lobe and trailing his fingers down my neck slightly in doing so. And I totally shivered. Visibly, not just on the inside.
"I..."
My mouth clamped shut as his hand dropped, both of us looking out toward the door to the shop when there was banging.
"Your not-boyfriend," Paine surmised as my hand automatically reached for my cell. It wasn't like him not to text when he arrived somewhere.
But, he had. Three times. I must have been too distracted to hear the ding.
"Must be," I agreed, slipping my phone into my pocket again and moving out toward the shop, taking a long, greedy sip of my coffee before placing it down on one of the desks. "Hey, Paine..." I said, turning back toward him, "thanks for, um, letting me in and for the coffee. I really appreciate it."
"Don't mention it," he said, shrugging. But he was also advancing at me in an almost predatory way that made me go back a foot before his arm went around me.
No, not just around me.
His hand settled hard on my ass, squeezing for a second.
My entire body froze, shocked, unsure how to respond. But the whole thing only lasted a total of maybe five seconds before his arm pulled back and I saw the scissors in his hand.
