I meet his dark eyes.
With him around, I don’t need food either.
The warning bells inside my head are now screaming. This man is a threat to the safety I’ve cultivated my whole life.
With an exhalation, I grab a plate and help salvage what’s left, cutting the crispest pieces in half, the two of us moving around each other easily while he scrambles half a dozen eggs. This ease and companionship feels dangerously like home.
He serves up the eggs and toast that he’d made earlier, and we eat standing by the counter—bacon, toast, nothing fancy—but his knuckles brush mine when he reaches for the butter, and that tiny touch is somehow more intimate than last night’s moans.
Yes. The man is most definitely lethal.
I bite into a strip of bacon. “This is so good.” The parts we’ve salvaged are salty perfection—comfort disguised as breakfast.
He glances up, that crooked half smile softening something fierce inside me.
“Thank you.”
“For?”
“All of this…” I indicate the food as well as the cabin. Truthfully I’m overwhelmed, not a feeling I’m accustomed to.
While I’m sure I could have gotten away from whoever is after me, this respite has been good, giving me time to think things through.
“Guessing it’s been a while since you had someone to take care of you.”
A while?
Honestly it’s never happened.
After my mom died, I’d been forced to grow up fast. Dad might have been a brilliant criminal mastermind, but he was hopeless at real-life stuff. I remember pulling a chair up to the stove to cook a meal. I did all the housework. And I got myself to school on the rare opportunities when we were actually settled in one place for more than a few weeks.
Even in my few relationships, I was the caretaker. Always the steady one, the problem-solver. And now here Stryker is, feeding me, looking after what he thinks are my best interests.
Desperate to remind myself of reality, I turn the conversation back to the reason we’re together. “Anything happen overnight that I need to know about?”
“Here?” He shakes his head. “Cameras only caught wildlife. Perimeter is secure.”
“Have you already been outside?” I look at him hard.
He lifts one of his sexy shoulders. “Every two hours.”
What? Seriously? I hadn’t even been aware of him leaving the bed.
How is it possible that I’d felt comfortable enough to sleep all night?
Then what he didn’t say hits me. “You said, here. Does that mean that something did happen that I need to know about?”
After taking a drink of coffee, he answers. “Our tail? The one on I-70? Car got away, but Hawkeye caught a partial plate.”
My stomach knots, and suddenly I lose my appetite. Unless the plates or car were stolen, Hawkeye will likely be able to get a lead. Even then, I know the firm has a more-than-friendly relationship with authorities all over the world. They may be able to access CCTV feeds. Eventually the trail will lead to the bad guys.
And back to me.
Stryker looks at me hard, seeing into me. Looking for my secrets. “You okay?”
Chapter Eighteen
Lyra
