After the cough subsided, I offered to help her to the kitchen.
“I’m fine, darling.”
She always said that, but she rarely was. The coughing fits left her weak, and I always worried she’d fall.
Letting go of her arm, I let her walk ahead of me. “I’m craving pancakes this morning. What do you think?”
Nana loved pancakes, so she never said no.
“With chocolate chips?”
“With blueberries.”
“Blueberries are good.”
Nana watched the news while I prepped the pancake batter and scrambled eggs for the spinach and feta omelet we’d share.
“That’s a relief. He deserves to stay in jail,” Nana said.
“Who deserves to stay in jail?”
I’d missed the story because my brain was trying not to think about why my shelf was empty. Which made me think about Austin. He no longer haunted my nightmares, and I tried even harder not to think about the way he kept starring in my dreams like a hero in a romance novel, and failed miserably.
My traitorous body reacted to him in the most inappropriate ways. A part of me couldn’t stop wondering if the tough guy was an act for his job.
What scant knowledge I had about the CIA came from books and TV, so for all I knew they trained their agents to act like jerks.
At SSI, he’d played the nice guy and opened my bottle of water and told me to drink, like he was worried about me staying hydrated as I cried.
Maybe the CIA taught him how to be hot and cold. Mean and nice. It’d make sense; spies would need to have multiple personalities.
I’m sure he wasn’t worried about me. But a girl could dream. After a string of beta boys, a term I’d learned from Ashley’s romance book, who did the bare minimum, Austin’s kind gestures felt like boyfriend material.
Not that he’d see it that way. It was probably something he learned in CIA school to keep a person talking. I chuckled to myself. Austin was definitely the good cop in the duo.
Austin could be intimidating when he wanted to be, but Ryan defined intimidation.
Ryan would’ve let me wipe my runny nose on my arm.
Austin handed me a tissue. Don’t even get me started on how his hand felt on my arm. Strong and steady, like power and passion rolled into one.
If I hadn’t been losing my mind from the flood of information and tsunami of emotions, I might have swooned or melted under his hand.
“Nina, did you hear me?”
“Sorry, Nana, I didn’t. Can you say it again?”
“I said that serial killer didn’t get parole.”
“Which serial killer?”
“The stalker, you remember the one who taunted his victims for weeks before kidnapping and torturing them before killing them?”
I did. Every girl in the greater Dallas area was terrified of finding a feather on her car, or in her mailbox, or wherever else he might put it.
Every state, county, and local cop worked overtime, along with the FBI, to catch the guy.
I shivered at the thought.
