AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Can I get you anything?”
“No, thank you,” she murmured, holding up the binoculars he handed to her.
“How about some water?” he asked.
She thanked him and took a sip from the glass he set on a ledge by the windows.
“It doesn’t get too warm here, even in the summer,” he said, handing her one of his sweatshirts, even though she had a couple of her own in the car. “The sun will be setting in about an hour, and then it’ll get chilly.”
She pulled the sweatshirt over her head, and loved that it smelled like him.
She looked up, and he was studying her. “What?” she asked.
“I’ve never brought anyone else here.”
“No?”
“Never even considered it.”
“Why not?”
“Because this place is special to me. Almost sacred, if that makes any sense.”
Ava nodded.
“No one else meant enough to me to share it with them.”
12
“Come here,” he said, pulling her to sit on his oversized sofa. He’d never seen another as big as this one until he saw Doc’s, which had to have been custom made. Once she was seated next to him, Razor reached over the cushions and pulled a blanket out of a basket.
“I thought you hadn’t spent much time on the East Coast,” she said when he covered her with the Hudson Bay wool.
“There’s this new thing, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one…what are they called? Oh yeah, catalogs.”
She swatted at him, but at least she smiled. That was really all he was going for.
“Close your eyes, sweet Avarie. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve fallen asleep to the sound of waves crashing against the shore. Even when Doc was gone and we didn’t know whether he was dead or alive, the sound of the ocean put me to sleep.”
It wasn’t long before Ava drifted off. He was quickly growing accustomed to her soft snores, which instead of grating on his last nerve like Gunner’s did, he found to be soothing.
He let his eyes drift closed, loving the feeling of Avarie McNamara snuggled up against him.
—:—
Half-awake and half-asleep, Ava tried to roll over, but something was keeping her from moving. She opened her eyes to find Tabon’s arm and leg wrapped around her from where he slept behind her on the sofa.
Soft light was streaming in through the window blinds, and while the room felt slightly chilly, Tabon did not.
When she tried to ease out of his grasp, he groaned and held on tighter.
“No,” he murmured. “It is not time to wake up yet, and it is especially not time for you to move.”
“But…I need to use the little girls’ room,” she said, smiling.
Tabon moved his leg first and then his arm.
“That’s the only excuse for getting up this early that I’ll accept.”
