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“Dumb,” I mutter and close it.
But I leave the handle unlocked.
And only then do I go into the bathroom and brush my teeth, do my business.
I crawl into bed, pull the blankets up.
Sleep is a long time coming.
Fifteen
Nova
I wakeup with an aching hip, a sore neck, and…warm.
I frown because I distinctly remember feeling cold just before exhaustion had risen up and claimed me.
Steve must be sprawled out on my chest, slowly suffocating me as he’s wont to do.
It’s the fatal flaw in his life plan of causing as much trouble and eating as much food as possible—if he kills his owner, he can still do plenty of the first, but the last will be difficult.
Unless he starts noshing on my dead body.
And I hold no false notions about him feeling bad about losing me—he’d definitely snack on a dead me, especially if my chonky boy got the hungries.
A bead of sweat starts to drip down between my breasts.
I wince, scrub at it, knowing this is far too much dead-body talk for whatever time in the morning it is—well, really, my dog eating my corpse is too much dead-body talk for any time of the day. As for the hour, I’m not sure what it is, aside from early, based on how tired I still am.
Though, that might be depression speaking.
Exhaustion pulling at every limb, the urge to pull the blankets over my head, to sleep for a thousand hours, every muscle aching.
Either that or I’m tired and sore because I’m sleeping in a nest of clothes on a cold hardwood floor.
“Right,” I whisper, peeling open my lids and blinking until my eyes adjust to the light…
From the fireplace.
From a much larger fire than I built.
I frown. Turn my head to the side, doing more blinking when I spy the under-cabinet lights are also on. And…cue more frowning.
IknowI turned those off before I went to bed.
Same as I know that my fire hadn’t had a pile of logs on it, that the basket hadn’t been full to the brim with firewood.
That I hadn’t been warm.
“What the hell?” I whisper, taking in the blankets—theextrablankets that had been draped over me and the…extra pillow behind my head that smells spicy and male and far too much like Lake for my own peace of mind.
I lift my head and Steve grunts in protest, his little head poking out from a blanket that I definitely hadn’t tucked over him.
Because I only grabbed the one blanket last night.
The fire. The blankets. The pillow. Steve wrapped up like an oversized burrito.
I either have a temperature fairy—or Lake has proven his humanity again.
