morning… and I wanted his face to be the last thing I saw before I went to sleep at night.
His eyes opened and he stared at me, frowning. “Woman, what on earth are you talking about?”
I reached up and brushed the tip of his nose with my fingertip, grinning. “I’m talking about you moving in with me. Obviously.” I cast a glance around the apartment, giving him time to get his face in order, and shrugged. “I mean I guess you could stay here. But it’s not exactly… homey.”
“Probably because it’s never been a home,” he said.
I turned back to see him grinning at me like I’d just given him the best gift in the entire world, and then he lifted me up—despite the bad shoulder—and spun me around.
“Are you serious?” he asked when we’d stopped spinning.
“Deadly,” I returned. “I didn’t want to leave Reno without you, and halfway here I realized that I didn’t even want to wake up without you. I want to have you all to myself. All the time. Whenever I want.”
“Selfish,” he whispered.
I shrugged. “Just used to getting what I want.”
Chapter 30
Jack
Of course it wasn’t quite that easy, the whole moving-in thing. Yeah, Alice made it sound like a cinch. Like something we were just going to do. As easy as pie.
But I’d lived too long, and seen way too much, to believe it would happen just like that. Hell, I’d known too many people in my life who said one thing and did another. And I’d been in way too many situations that had looked like they were going to turn out one way… and then had gone in a direction I’d never expected.
It wasn’t like I didn’t trust Alice. It was just that I didn’t trust life itself. Didn’t trust the world to play fair with me. Because it never had. And kidnapping a billionaire businesswoman, then realizing halfway through the drive to the drop-off point that I was in falling for her… and then finding out that surprise, she was falling for me, too—and wanted me to move into her enormous house with her and share her enormous life?
I mean, color me paranoid, but doesn’t that just sound like a made-up story? Like something you can’t possibly—shouldn’t possibly—believe?
Which was exactly why I’d immediately started throwing things in our way, I guess. The first and most important was that I said her daughter had to approve of me before I could do anything like even think about moving in with her.
And yeah, I admit it. I’d thought—subconsciously, of course—that that would be the end of that. Because I had never known any ten-year-olds aside from myself. And I hadn’t exactly been the normal kind. I didn’t know what they were like or what they would want to do or who they’d want to meet, but I’d thought for sure that it wouldn’t be me. I thought I’d be too big and loud and scary for any ten-year-old. I thought Rhea would take one look at me and run away, screaming.
By the time we walked into Alice’s house later that night, I’d been proven completely, utterly wrong on that point. Because Rhea had taken one look at me and started talking, and I didn’t think she’d shut up once since then. Even when her mouth was full of the most delicious hamburgers I’d ever tasted.
Now, Rhea was actually attached to my side, hanging off my hand and giving me at least fifty different reasons that we needed an entire room devoted to old-model video game machines in the house.
“And if you’re here and I’m here and we both agree on that, then Mom has to tell us yes, right?” she said breathlessly.
I didn’t answer. I’d figured out at this point that I didn’t have to. Because she assumed that I was going to agree with everything she said—and generally went right on talking, regardless of whether I’d answered her or not.
“And if you’re living here, too, then it means you get an equal vote to Mom’s. And also, since I saved your lives, then I should get an equal vote too, don’t you think?”
She wasn’t wrong. About the saving our lives thing, I mean. Because it turned out that when I’d let Alice use her phone to call Rhea that afternoon in Reno, it had been Rhea who’d managed to locate us, using one of Alice’s apps, which traced the location of any phone it had been linked to. She’d been the one who’d