He looks impressed as he looks at me. “Extra hot sauce coming right up.”
I smile to myself as I wander around, looking at the photos on the mantle of the fireplace. “Is this you?” I ask as I point to a picture of an adorable little boy riding a tractor. He’s got a huge smile on his face with the cutest cheeks imaginable.
He laughs. “Yeah, that’s me. I grew up in Wisconsin. My parents were accountants, but they had a hobby farm. A few animals, a few big gardens. It was nice.”
“I bet,” I say as I look at an old picture of his parents when they were our age. I can see where Shane gets his handsome rugged looks from.
“Where did you grow up?” he asks as he starts chopping a red pepper.
“Paris.”
His eyes dart up to mine. “In France?”
“That’s the one,” I say with a nod. “And Vancouver, and Jakarta, and Cape Town, and a few other places.”
“Wow, you moved around a lot.”
“Yeah, my dad was an executive in the pharmaceutical industry. He bounced around the planet for different jobs and dragged me and my mom with him. It was rough.”
“Where do you call home now?”
I spread my arms out and spin around. “Wherever the wind takes me. I’m a citizen of the planet. That’s as narrow as it gets.”
“Do you sometimes wish you had a home base though?”
“Yeah,” I say with a sigh. “I’d like to have a home. A family. But you know, I don’t… so, I’m fighting the good fight. I’m volunteering myself to be a soldier on the front lines. If I can’t dedicate myself to a family, then I’ll dedicate it to saving animals.”
He takes a pan out and turns the oven on as I walk over to the island and pull out a stool.
“You must really love animals.”
“I do,” I say as I sit down and rub the tattoo on my arm. “When I was bouncing from place to place, I didn’t have many friends. My life was so different from the kids at school. They had never even heard of the places I lived. Some of them hadn’t even left their neighborhoods, so it was hard to relate. I don’t know… I guess the only friends I ever really had were animals. I hate how we treat them.”
I feel a bit silly as he chops an onion in silence until I realize he’s thinking about what I just said. I like how he doesn’t immediately rebut me or jump to an argument. He takes the time to think about my words and process them before he speaks.
You tend to get a lot of hate when you tell people you’re a vegetarian or that you’re fighting to make the world a better, safer place for animals. I never understood that.
He laughs, and at first I think he’s laughing at me, but he’s not. “I was like that too as a kid,” he says. “I had a bit of a temper and I’d always get into fights at school, so I didn’t have many friends either. But when I got home, my real friends were always waiting. The dog, the cat, the donkey, the pig, and the cows. I loved taking care of them.”
“Sounds like a nice childhood,” I say with a smile as I watch him start to fry up the onions.
My stomach growls for the food, and another part of me growls for him. There’s something really sexy about watching a gorgeous man cooking me food in his spectacular kitchen. I could watch this all day.
We chat about how I got into the Marine Protectors and how he got started with the rig. I was in college and joined an animal conservation group. One thing led to another and before long I was breaking into labs to free animals and getting arrested at factory farming protests. The Marine Protectors recruited me after I was caught on the news spray painting a slaughterhouse.
“Extra hot sauce,” Shane says as he slides the omelet in front of me and lifts the bottle. His eyebrow raises challengingly as he starts squirting it on.
I grin, not telling him to stop until it’s drenched in the red sauce.
“You’re going to need the fire extinguisher after eating that.”
I laugh as I grab my fork and dive in. He’s a good cook and turning out to be quite the catch.
Suddenly, I’m not so eager to leave this rig.
I’d like to stay a bit and see where this is going.
Because it definitely feels like it’s going somewhere.
Somewhere fun.
Somewhere exciting.
And somewhere I don’t want to leave.
Chapter Five
Shane
* * *
I excuse myself as Janice finishes her eggs. She smiles at me and watches as I grab my radio and head into the bedroom.
“Jamal,” I say into the mic as I squeeze the button.