Fake Boyfriend - Miley Maine Page 0,60

some blankets for me. I took them without saying thank you.

Once I’d settled on the couch, he came to sit in front of me. “Listen. This is very important. If anyone shows up here, do not let them inside. Do not open the door. Even if it’s one of your family members,” he said.

Why did he think my family would show up? I knew better than to ask. “Okay,” I said, and I turned over and went to sleep.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Jackson

I’d really screwed up with Loren. It would be easy to blame my attitude on the stress we’d both faced recently, but the truth was that sometimes I just thought I knew the best.

And sometimes I did know best, which only reinforced my belief.

I didn’t come up with that assessment on my own -- my teammates had told me that I was controlling more than a few times, with varying degrees of anger. So this was nothing new for me. But it was the first time that I really wanted to change that, for any reason other than practicality.

If my team was mad because I was too controlling, then I needed to adjust so we were operating at maximum efficiency. I really didn’t care about consoling them or coddling them.

But with Loren, I wanted to make her life easier, and happier. And so far I’d done neither.

I had saved her life, but I could tell that I’d really done something that crossed the line on the way to the cabin. Was it the fake relationship comment? I wasn’t sure why that was so offensive. It was her idea.

And I really wasn’t up for asking. I just wanted things to go back to the way they were.

I wanted a relationship with Loren. I didn’t want it to be fake. But I had no fucking clue how to get there. It probably wasn’t even possible. She was just starting out in life, and I was in the middle of my very disruptive and dangerous career.

When Loren woke up, her black mood had dissipated, and the sunny smile I’d come to enjoy was back.

She bounced up off the couch and went to brush her teeth. When she was done in the bathroom, she held her hand out. “Truce?” she asked.

I shook her hand. “Truce.” I really wanted to survey the property, and see how best to fortify it or defend it, if it came to that. I’d disabled both our phones so they couldn't be tracked, but rich people have resources, and I’d never underestimate how much their money could accomplish when they wanted something. I wasn’t sure that Douglas had much money to throw around, but in the case of a missing cousin, would Marie be willing to donate to the cause?

I had no idea. I wasn’t sure if her family even knew she’d been kidnapped. The kidnappers had told her they wanted money, but they’d clearly had a boss, someone pulling the strings that neither of us ever saw.

I thought that puppet-master was Douglas, and I thought he might be coming after us.

He was desperate, and a desperate person was a scary person. Loren might be mad at me, but I was going to keep her safe as well as I could.

“You want to ride the four-wheeler with me?” I asked her.

“Sure.” Because she’d been kidnapped wearing a nice dress, but now she put on a pair of my shorts and tied them up, along with one of my t-shirts. She looked adorable.

I got the four-wheeler started and she hopped on, right behind me. Her bare legs were pressed right up against my jeans. And her breasts were pressed right up against my back.

I concentrated on navigating over the uneven land. We stopped and repaired fence posts, and picked up fallen branches, and I kept an eye out for anything suspicious.

After we’d checked every inch of the fence, we waded through the lake, and then we went to the patch of ground my grandfather called his wild garden, where he’d grown onions and miner’s lettuce and because they didn’t take any work to maintain, they kept coming back year after year.

We gathered as much lettuce as we could carry and took it back to the cabin to make a salad.

Even though we weren’t acting on it, there was still so much chemistry between us. I had to force myself not to do things like lace our fingers together, pull her close to me and kiss her, and grab her around the waist