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I’m YoUr BiGgEsT FaN, AVA! I WaNt To ShOw YoU I PeFeCtEd ThE Skillet Lasagna!
This person, assuming they were working alone, seemed to fall into the admiring stalker category. “You said there were three emails?”
Ava clicked on the last one, but this time no message was included, just a picture of food.
Whoever took this photo knew to include very little in the background. Other than the Tupperware container the food was stored in, you could only see a pale wood countertop, a plate, and a fork. Nothing discerning, no background window to indicate a location. This could be anywhere.
Could even be a stock photo.
“Keep all this. We’ll bring this to TSS tomorrow, and I’ll show it to my team during our huddle.”
“I’m going with you?” Ava asks.
I lean back to look at her. “Of course. I can’t let you out of my sight. Whoever is behind all this is waiting for me to let my guard down.”
Ava can’t hide her grin. “Can’t believe I, a mere mortal, is finally going to see the illustrious office of Tri-State Security. Asher talks about that place like it’s CIA headquarters.”
I laugh. “It might as well be. I try not to let many people in there if not required, but you’re special.”
Ava raises a brow at my words, and I realize what I blurted out. “I mean your situation is special—er, not that you aren’t special, it’s just?—"
Ava does nothing to hide the fact she’s laughing at me, and I stop before I truly put my foot in it. “You know what I meant.”
“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Brandon Eastwood flustered.” She puts her hand on my denim-clad knee. “I certainly like flustered Brandon over bossy or grumpy.”
I haven’t been a boy in a long time, but something about Ava’s small hand on my knee takes me back to the randy teenage years when a girl touching me could…affect me almost instantaneously.
This is no mere primary school girl. It’s Ava, whose large brown eyes are boring into my own, her perfect full lips upturned at my expense. The warmth of her hand softly placed on my knee causes me to lean towards her when a timer dings, making us both jump back.
“I need to go check on the stove,” she says, practically sprinting from the couch.
What is wrong with me? I nearly leant into a kiss with Ava of all women.
Only hours earlier, her brother left his sister in my care because he trusts me.
Asher stopped by with Ava’s phone and the handbag she left at Stonybrook. The excitement on her face for getting a phone back was akin to a parent realizing their child wasn’t lost but just hiding.
Before leaving, Asher pulled me to the side, out of an earshot of Ava, and simply said, “Take care of her.”
“With my life,” I responded, and then my best friend left, returning to his family on the Upper East Side.
Pretty sure he meant to take care of her in the literal sense and not in the bedroom sense, though tell that to my hormones.I am attracted to my best friend’s little sister.Kid sister if I’m being honest with myself.
I distinctly remember Ava’s chubby toddler legs trying to keep up with us during school breaks when I opted to spend time with the Wells family at Stonybrook instead of returning to London with my father. The blighter only made my childhood hell, and the Wells were a welcome reprieve.
Now, it was almost as if I’d blinked one day and Ava wasn’t a little girl anymore but a fully grown woman with her own lifestyle blog and subsequent string of undeserving boyfriends, much to her brother’s chagrin. She’d been a shy girl who used to blink her too large for her face eyes at me, and now here I was seconds from nearly devouring her, saved by the literal bell of the kitchen timer.
“Dinner is almost ready,” she calls out.
I take the laptop with me as I pull out a stool from the breakfast nook. Before continuing the work I was doing, I take a moment to watch Ava move seamlessly through the kitchen. The spicy scent from the meal she’s cooking makes the entire apartment smell amazing.
She’s softly humming along as she quickly peeks in the oven.
“Not quite,” she says to herself.
I picture Ava several years from now, a wife and mother cooking for curly haired children with her brown eyes. Ava would certainly be the kind of woman who’d juggle family and world domination with her cooking empire all at the same time. Without breaking a sweat.
I envied the bloke who’d get to come home to Ava.
