Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven #1) - J.R. Ward Page 0,86
he unlocked the cellar door and went into the basement. After she turned on the oven and put two carb blocks on a baking sheet, she sat down at the table.
And felt like crying.
Instead of giving in to all that nonsense, she took the gold medallion her grandfather had given her on his death bed and rubbed it back and forth between her fingers.
When Daniel came up the stairs, his weight was so great, the wood steps creaked, and then he was in the open jambs.
“Would you like to stay in the guest room?” she said abruptly.
“Yes,” he answered. “I would.”
Out at his Harley, Daniel lit up a cigarette. He only coughed once, which was progress in a bad direction. But whatever, as soon as shit got handled, he was going to quit again. This was just a vacation, not a permanent relocation, to Nicotineville.
Biting on the filter with his front teeth, he leaned down and unbuckled his saddlebags. When he straightened, he checked the barren lawn and the rough line of the forest—or what he could see of things as the night sucked the light out of the sky. Still, the silence around him was so pervasive, he was inclined to trust what his ears were telling him: Nobody else was on the property.
At least not right now.
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
He looked over his shoulder. Then he bunny-eared the cigarette and exhaled. “I un-quit today.”
“I can’t say as I blame you.”
“I won’t do it inside, and this is not, like, I’m not forever with this.”
“My grandfather smoked a pipe. More fragrant, but not that different.” Lydia sat down on the back steps. “Was stopping part of your health kick?”
“That and the drinking. I was never into drugs—but I got a little too fond of Jack Daniel’s. That I will never un-quit.”
“I’m glad you got things under control there.”
“Me, too. Not a road I’m going down again.”
Out on the county road, a car approached and kept going, the headlights white, the taillights red.
“I’m sorry you’re mixed up in all this.” She took her hair out of its tie and rubbed her scalp as if she were trying to relieve a headache. “You came for a job, and now—”
“I have a job.”
“Well, technically, that’s just an eight-thirty to four-thirty kind of thing. So you’re working overtime and not getting paid here.”
Daniel exhaled over his shoulder even though the wind would have carried the smoke off anyway. “I’m not staying with you for work. We’re … friends. I’m here because a friend needs my help.”
“Friends.”
“Yup.” He tapped the cigarette. “Unless you have a better word for it.”
“English is my second language. I wouldn’t know.”
“Wow, you sound like a native speaker to me.” He looked around again at the lawn, the drive, the house. “No accent. Good vocabulary. If there were another word, I think you’d know it.”
“I guess … friends it is.”
Daniel nodded, licked his fingertips, and crushed what was glowing orange—
“Ow!” she said as she jumped forward. But she stopped herself before she touched him, falling back into her sit. “Didn’t that hurt.”
“Pain is in the mind.” He tapped the side of his head. “All up here.”
“I thought that was fear.”
“Pain, fear, anxiety. The mind game is everything in life.”
“What about joy, love, happiness? Are they just in the mind, too?”
“Yup, exactly. It’s all an illusion, I’m afraid. Made manifest by a fruit salad of sensory receptors and bundles of neurons firing under your skull.”
“Wow, that is remarkably …”
“Biological,” he pointed out.
“Cynical.”
Daniel shrugged and finished undoing his saddlebags. “It’s the truth and you know it. You’re a behaviorist. Just because an emotion is felt deeply doesn’t mean it’s any more powerful than what it actually is—which is ephemeral. Intensity doesn’t change its nature, and all feelings fade over time.”
There was a length of silence.
“You know”—she looked at the sky—“I might be inclined to see your argument. If I hadn’t walked in on a good man just moments after he’d shot himself in the face this morning.”
Daniel swung the saddlebags up on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I don’t need to be spouting my shit right now.”
“It’s okay.” She got to her feet. “Besides, you either don’t really believe your theory or you’re not as good at detachment as you think you are. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have taken up your old habit again today, would you.”
YOU ’RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. The ketchup is everything.”
As Daniel Heinz’d his full plate of suomen makaronilaatikko, Lydia nodded at her houseguest across her little kitchen table.