She studied me for a few seconds, then shrugged. “I could use a shower I don’t have to pay for.”
So that was what she’d been doing. “Where have you been going?”
“A local gym,” she admitted. “You can buy a shower for five bucks.”
Interesting. I hadn’t known we had a gym like that in the area.
What we had was generally small. Getting a gym of any kind to survive in the town would take a lot of effort.
“Let’s go,” she urged as she got onto the bike without waiting for me to mount it first.
Grinning, I mounted in front of her, sitting down practically in her lap.
“Hold this,” she said, handing me her half-finished candy bar.
I did, resisting taking a bite like I wanted to.
I didn’t usually need to do sweets.
Honestly, I’d rather taste the Snickers off of her tongue…
“Thanks.” She reached for it back after she situated herself behind me. “You didn’t eat any, did you?”
I snorted as I reached for the ignition. “No. Sweets aren’t really my thing.”
Unless they were baked goods. Then, they were my thing.
Starting the bike, I headed home, thankful that she hadn’t put up much of a fight.
Originally, the thought wasn’t on her being at the site where Ellen could retaliate for a perceived slight. It’d just been my selfishness of wanting to have Matilda with me, in my home, where I could keep an eye on her.
Where I could have her in my home, just in case things went further than platonic hugging.
If I could just taste her…
CHAPTER 10
I’m both hellfire and holy water. What you get depends on how you treat me.
-Matilda to Etienne
MATILDA
My eyes met with the sphynx’s. The one he’d gotten off the side of the road.
It was triple the size it’d been when I’d seen him last, and it lay on top of the microwave, I’m sure, leaching the heat off of it.
I was at Etienne’s home, and he was showing me around like I was moving in.
Was I?
“This is the spare bedroom,” he said as he flipped the light on and stepped out of the doorway for me to enter. “You can sleep in here… unless you want the best mattress you’ve ever slept on. Then you’ll have to join me. And that’s Hairy… you’ve met Hairy before, though.”
I looked at him over my shoulder, wondering if he was joking.
It didn’t look like he was.
In fact, he looked very, very serious.
I tilted my head. “Is it a special kind of bed?”
“I ordered it from a retailer in Alaska,” he explained as he jerked his head to follow him.
I did, unsure what I would find, and stopped dead in my tracks when I saw it.
“Holy shit,” I breathed. “That’s… wow. That’s big.”
In my head, I finished that statement with, “that’s what she said.”
That was why I started to snicker.
He looked at me curiously, eyebrow raised, waiting for an answer.
Expecting an answer.
“I tacked on ‘that’s what she said’ in my head,” I explained.
He snorted and walked farther into the room.
“Sheets are a bitch to find,” he said as he disappeared into what I assumed was a closet.
For a home builder, the place was fairly modest.
I would’ve expected more… flair.
Which I told him in the next breath.
“Usually,” he said, “a builder that’s worth his salt spends more time making other people’s dream homes than his own. Hell, I don’t even have enough time at home to make anything extra special worth it. I hit the ground running as soon as I got out, and from there, have barely had time to allow my head to rest on this pillow. One day, though, I’ll build mine. I don’t know when… but it’ll happen.”
“I think it’s called having a work ethic, which a lot of people don’t have nowadays.” I paused. “None of my family has it.”
“I think that we were unfairly thrust into families that weren’t ours. Like we were stolen at birth,” he grinned, his face shifting to the window. “Cassius is here.”
I followed him out the door and came to a stop in his living room where the world’s most comfortable-looking couch resided.
While Etienne went to the door, I went to the couch, and all but collapsed on top of it.
That’s where I lay when both men joined me in the living room, taking the smaller couch on the opposite side of the room seeing as I was taking up the larger one.
“You look rough,” I said the moment I saw Cassius.
I didn’t know him well.
Hell, I didn’t know any of them well.
My best friend was dating one of them, and I didn’t even know that one well.
I had trouble getting to know people that didn’t put the effort in themselves first, and so all of these men were new to me.
Etienne included.
Cassius’s dark eyes came to meet mine, and I would’ve shivered and withdrawn at the intensity in them had I not been sprawled on the couch with nowhere to go.