Sweetest in the Gale - Olivia Dade Page 0,64

the creature in her home. A good one.

She did. Of course she did. For all her love of murder and mayhem, her heart was as soft and warm as the enveloping, pillowy duvet on her bed. He also suspected she’d empathized with that lonely squirrel in the pawn shop window more than she might like to admit.

Hell, after that conversation, he’d empathized with the rodent too. To the point where he kind of didn’t mind Barry’s presence in his daily life, and maybe—when Poppy wasn’t around—muttered an occasional quick hello to the third member of their household.

Sometimes. No more than once per morning.

Poppy truly was capable of performing miracles.

She’d stolen his heart, when anyone would have told her he didn’t have one. She’d inspired him, a man who loved order and rules, a man who’d been alone virtually all his life, to move in with her after only three months together.

It was madness. Color and clutter and violent crime in miniature. Near-constant noise. Off-key singing in the sunshine of her work room as she carefully depicted blood splatter, while he sat with a book in his brand-new club chair, feet propped comfortably on an ottoman.

Then, inevitably, it was her arms around his shoulders, her breath in his ear, his fists in her hair, then his mouth between her legs. She didn’t complain about his silence then, and she certainly didn’t bemoan his stiffness once they’d tumbled onto her mattress.

It was warmth in the darkness and laughter in the light.

He’d never been happier in his life.

This dream he kept having, the one he’d had again last night—this vision he hadn’t been able to shake, not for a single minute all day—was abject foolishness, and he really should be paying attention to the speaker, but—

He nudged Poppy’s arm with his legal pad.

She glanced up from detailing the sparkle in Barry’s crossed eyes, her brow adorably puckered in concentration. Settling his thigh more firmly against hers, he wrote a note on his paper, beside the neat rectangular pyramid he’d doodled earlier.

Want to play Hangman?

As soon as she read the question, she huffed out a quiet laugh and flipped to a fresh page in her spiral-bound notebook.

Of course, Mr. Burnham, she jotted in her looping script.

He hesitated, then added, May I choose the phrase?

Normally, he’d let her go first, but…not this time.

She waved him on with a tiny, subtle gesture, and he carefully drew the gallows and blank spaces beneath, the spaces she’d try to fill by guessing letters, one by one.

Her first choice: an S. There were none of those in his phrase, so he needed to start sketching his stick-figure person. A head within the loop of rope.

According to the normal rules of the game, he supposed that person should be Poppy, perhaps indicated with buns on either side of her circle head. But even within the context of an innocent child’s game, he didn’t want to imagine her at risk.

He drew his own head instead. A circle with a squiggle of dark hair on top.

When she registered that choice, her eyes went soft, and her knee slid against his thigh so sweetly. With a single fingertip, she skimmed the back of his hand before dropping hers to her lap.

He was sweating now, his breath short, and for once, the reaction wasn’t due to lust. It wasn’t even due to the somewhat ghoulish sight of his stick-figure head within a noose.

It was nerves. Pure nerves and adoration.

More guesses followed. A. T. N. E. B. R. Slowly, the letters began filling in his chosen phrase, and his drawing sprouted arms and a torso. In a burst of uncharacteristic whimsy, he added buttons down that torso to indicate his usual shirts, even including a striped tie for the hell of it.

_ARR_ _E_

She was sneaking glances at him now, her fingers beginning to tremble, her brow puckered again in seeming confusion.

If he’d gotten this wrong, if her answer wasn’t what he hoped, he really was a dead man. Not physically, but in nearly every other way. All the ways that had come to mean everything to him over the past eight months.

Her next guess was a nearly indecipherable scratch, and her cheeks were blotched with ruddy color as she scrawled the letter. M?

She wrote it with a question mark, but there was no need for that. No need for her to worry she’d gotten this, gotten him, wrong. No need for the hectic color on her face, unless—

Oh, fuck, was she going to say no?