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“Mr. Shaw.” I heard Maggie from somewhere behind me, but I didn’t move to find her. “May I please have an order of chicken pad Thai?”
She stood in front of the coffee table, her slender legs in the sexiest pair of cut-off shorts the only part of her in my view. She was every country boy’s wet dream.
“Also, here’s twenty dollars to cover it. I’ll pay the rest later. It’s all I have on me.” She set the menu down on the table with a twenty-dollar bill on top of it.
“Your money’s no good here.”
“Yes, Mr. Shaw.” She grabbed the twenty, stuffed it in her back pocket, then walked to the window and gazed out at the night sky. I wondered what she was thinking about.
“You have a beautiful view, Mr. Shaw.” She turned around to face me, eyes trained on mine. “It’s almost like you’re cut off from the rest of the world, but no man’s an island in the end. Are they?”
Perhaps not, but I tried to be.
17
Maggie
Instead of answering my question—not that I had expected him to reply in his current state of jerkiness—Lucas threw back the rest of the liquid in his glass, then poured himself another round, not adding ice or anything else to it. He was chasing straight booze to quiet his demons. I’d watched this act play out before with an old boyfriend. The demons won.
“Care to join me for a drink?” Lucas held his glass up toward me. His icy blue eyes trailed over my bare skin, causing me to shiver.
“Not while I’m working.” I tilted my head and pointed toward his bedroom where Esmé slept. “Someone has to keep their wits about them.”
“Yeah, right. It’s what I’m paying you to do.” His words weren’t just cold and thoughtless, they belittled me as if I was nothing to him.
I stepped back and leaned against the window, my palms lying flat on the glass behind me at my hips. Lucas turned his eyes away from me and trained them on his glass of amber promises. He was old enough and obviously smart enough to know the answers he was looking for weren’t sitting inside his glass. Yet he seemed adrift, floating on a sea with no land in sight.
My degree in psychology taught me not to take someone’s anger personally. Though, admittedly, everything he’d thrown at me since I’d knocked on the door had hurt like hell. I needed to distance myself from him. Take a step back. Instead of thinking how dare he, ask why. What happened to make him build up such a fortress, isolating him from feeling anything? Well…maybe not anything. He sure knew how to feel hate. But who did he hate? His parents? An ex-girlfriend? The answer was locked away.
He picked up his phone and tapped away on the screen, probably ordering us dinner. I wasn’t that hungry but wanted something to give me energy in case the baby wasn’t sleeping through the night yet.
Lucas didn’t know it, but babies were my Zen, like a natural valium to my mind and soul. I was the most sought after babysitter in my hometown. Mothers didn’t have the means Lucas had, but they would out-do each other pay-wise to have me watch their kids on a Saturday night.
One nice thing about small children, they went to bed early, allowing me to sneak my high school boyfriend into the house later. I was giving up my Saturday night, after all, the holiest of holies to a teenager. One time, I got caught with my boyfriend when the parents came home earlier than I’d expected. Thankfully, we both had our clothes on.
Lucas rose off the couch, an empty glass in one hand, bottle of booze in the other. He barreled through his last pour like a man lost in the desert.
“I’m going to my office. Let me know when dinner arrives.” His shin knocked into the coffee table, making a loud crack. “Shit.”
“That had to hurt.”
“Not as much as this day.” He exited down a hallway to the opposite end of the apartment from his bedroom, and my shoulders slumped in relief at the reprieve from all the tension in the air. It made it difficult for me to breathe. After a few deep inhales, the extra oxygen lowered the adrenaline racing through my veins, so I headed toward the kitchen making a do-to list in my head. Esmé would be hungry when she woke up, whether it was in an hour, or, if I was lucky, way later into the night. I needed to be prepared when she did, but first, I had to find the damn light switch so I could see in the kitchen.
After five minutes of looking high and low, I realized the switch was a screen panel, similar to a smart phone. The apartment was a smart home for smart people, unlike me. At least turning on a light didn’t require a password. Since everything was wired in the house, he was probably watching me from the other room on a computer. I shook my head, wondering if I should moon him or raise my middle finger. I had business to attend to, though, and didn’t even search for a mounted camera. There’d be time for that later.
