With the candy stuck in my cheek, I pulled out the piece of meat and set it beside the crockpot. She grabbed two apples from a bowl along with an onion and set them on the wood butcher block.
“Men need sleep, food and exercise. They get those three things, they’re happy. If a man’s cranky, then he hasn’t had one of the three.”
I thought about that as she roughly sliced an apple and tossed it in the pot.
Sleep, food and exercise. A man also needed sex, and a lot of it, but I assumed Mrs. L put that under exercise. Otherwise, she was probably right.
“Women are more complicated.”
I grunted and leaned against the counter to watch her work. I’d help, but I didn’t know what she was making. And, she was armed with a knife.
“I assume you want to know what a woman wants in a man.”
She looked over her shoulder at me. I wasn’t getting out of this since I opened my big fucking mouth, so I nodded.
Of course, she wasn’t poking fun at me like the guys would. We didn’t talk about feelings or women. Or anything besides guns and the power of C4 and how a big explosion made us happy.
“It’s pretty simple. She wants a guy who sticks. Who sees only her. Always.”
With a big fork, she sat the pork roast on top of the apple slices. Then she added more apples on top along with the circles of onion.
“That’s it?”
She grabbed the apple juice from the fridge and poured a cup or two into the pot. I wasn’t sure what this recipe was exactly, but I knew it would be delicious. Everything she made was fucking good.
She set the lid on the top and pushed the button to start the cooking process. By the time dinner came, the meal would be ready.
“That’s it.”
A guy who sticks. Who only sees her.
I put Mrs. L’s words together with what Quincy had said to me. Quincy didn’t think I would stick. Even though I’d taken care of her after she’d passed out, she thought I jumped from bed to bed. Which meant she didn’t think I only saw her.
I was doing this wrong. Mrs. L listed two things, and I was messing them both up.
Really. Fucking. Wrong.
* * *
QUINCY
It had beentwo weeks since we’d been back from Mexico.
I’d learned that not only did Ford want a verbal debrief from the job, but written statements from each of us. The report included an inventory of supplies, so for me, I had to put a borrowed helicopter on the list. The amount of fuel used. Any issues with the machinery. User challenges. What my opinion was on whether we’d use the same bird or company again.
Only after he’d collected everyone’s reports did Ford write up a master one to share with the client along with the bill. I could only imagine the itemized expense report.
But jobs like the retrieve and rescue we’d just accomplished paid the bills and bought the fancy helicopter that was in the hangar up on the mountain. And my salary. I’d heard the tab was in the low seven figures–the extraction, not my salary–so Alpha Mountain Security was doing pretty well.
That was why Ford ensured that whoever went on a job had at least a week of downtime after. Since the entire team went, we had a stretch off. Except for PT in the mornings and the emergency rescue training we’d done in town, we’d had free time.
I didn’t like to think of my little fainting spell because while the guys never mentioned it, they’d watched me with a touch more concern, and they ensured I was never without a water bottle. They weren’t doing it because I was a girl but because I was part of the team.
Taft had his knee shot up on deployment, and while they didn’t baby him, they ensured he took care of himself and didn’t overdo it and fuck up his knee any worse.
Still, I was sick of their faces. So it hadn’t been hard for the other women to pull me into a ladies' night, starting with dinner and then later moving onto drinks at K-Sparks.
Holly, Indi and I were at a booth at the local steakhouse. Megan had arrived late, just getting off shift. She’d gone home and changed out of her uniform and now matched us in casual jeans or flirty skirts. Holly’d gone so far as to curl her usually straight hair.