He slowly shook his head as dark desire surfaced in his gaze. “Oh no, Drew. I don’t think survival skills are sexy. I think beautiful women who know how to take care of themselves and others, while knowing how to game the system are sexy. Lethal women? Even better.”
Oh shit.
I wasn’t a stranger to men hitting on me, or making a pass, but sitting in the car alone with Fletcher, barely a foot separating us, I suddenly lost the ability to speak.
“The blush suits you.” He reached out a hand as his thumb brushed lightly against my cheek. “You seem so incredibly tough all the time, but this lets me know you’re not immune.”
With that, he pulled out the lotion and liberally applied it to his hands. He was halfway out of the car when I found my words. “Immune to what?”
He glanced over his shoulder and winked. “To me.”
Emotions I’ve only ever felt with Rick bubbled over, and I had to admit, there was a slice of those emotions that I’d never even felt with him. I couldn’t quite put a name to it, but the flirty confession he’d just shared made me feel like a simpering school girl. But without all the incessant giggling.
Lotioning up my own hands, I replayed his words through my head. Fletcher was undoubtedly a flirt, with a loud personality when his guard was down. He probably spoke to women like that all the time.
I scanned the parking lot as I walked in and paid the attendant for gas, and headed straight back to the car. The top of Fletcher’s head had been bobbing over the back row of snacks, and like someone who was truly uncomfortable with his semiserious flirting, I ducked out before he could pile on any more of his charm.
With Rick, we shared a slow burn of desire and affection between us. He had quickly become the constant I never knew I needed. Then there was Fletcher who had the ability to set off a wild burst of butterflies in my stomach.
After I pumped gas, careful to wipe off the handle and the switch, I hopped back in the car. Then I turned my mind to the storage unit. Partly to get my head back in the game and go through what I hoped to accomplish, and partly to build my mental wall back up.
I wasn’t trying to block Fletcher out, not at all. I was trying to compartmentalize until I could figure out what I wanted from him, and most especially what he wanted from me.
When he came back carrying several bags of snacks and drinks, he behaved as if the earlier moment had never happened. Which was great. It allowed me to pretend it didn’t happen either.
“How much farther?” He asked as he cracked open an energy drink in a neon orange can.
I glanced down when he pulled out a water bottle for me. There were three other energy drinks in the bag. I really hoped he wasn’t planning on drinking all of those. That would seriously affect the way I approached the storage unit, if he was bouncing from one side to the other.
“Not far now. Maybe thirty minutes or so. You’re not going to drink all those today, are you?” I took the water bottle after he kindly twisted the cap off.
“Maybe two. The others are just in case.”
Frowning, I adjust the air before glancing over at him again. “Just in case what?”
“In case we have to break some Da Vinci code type encryption to get into the damn place.” A small grin curled his lips as he brought the energy to his mouth.
“Fair enough.” I pulled out onto the highway to finish the last leg of the trip. Fletcher quietly munched on his snacks until we arrived at an old storage facility.
The asphalt was cracked and overrun with weeds. An inactive camera pointed down at the entrance of the chain link fence. Maybe at one time it was more secure, but the dented gate was in no shape to close anymore.
“What’s supposed to be in this storage unit?” Fletcher swung his head around, taking in how dilapidated this place truly was. “I had envisioned something a little more high end, and James Bond-esque, when you said we needed to come here.”
That was the beauty of Daddy’s brain. He would have picked the most unassuming facility to house his darkest secrets because no one would ever suspect. The psychology of it was genius. That, and we both had a posh facility or two that we didn’t keep anything of damning value in.
Smoke and mirrors.
“This was my dad’s, and one I didn’t know about.” I hesitated. Outside of Uncle David, I hadn’t breathed a word of what happened to him to anyone else. Not that I was close enough to anyone else to share this with, but it also gave life to something I didn’t want to think about.
I parked in front of the storage unit and left the car running while I stared at the door. This could have all the answers I’d been searching for. A trickle of apprehension threaded through me as I worked up the determination to get out of the car.
“Drew?” Fletcher snapped his fingers next to my ear.
When I turned to glare at him, he held his hands up. “Okay, noted. Snapping my fingers at you was very misogynistic of me and I apologize.”
It was damn funny, and it took everything I had not to laugh, because I really was irritated with that move.
“Are you done?”