Fire & Brimstone (Neighbor from Hell #8) - R.L. Mathewson Page 0,26

the bullshit that he’d put her through in the last ten minutes, placed his hand back on her stomach where it belonged.

Chapter 13

“Do you ever stop talking, woman?” he snapped, wondering how it was humanly possible for one person to talk so God damn much.

Instead of getting insulted or bursting into tears like most women would, Rebecca simply pursed her lips up in thought while he laid there, wondering why he hadn’t left when she’d given him a chance.

“Probably not,” she admitted with a shrug as she lay there, absently tapping her fingertips against the back of his hand as he continued to provide light pressure against her stomach.

Despite the fact that he wanted to strangle her, his lips twitched.

“You should probably give it a try,” he said, absently noting that the annoying woman was a blanket hog.

“I have,” she said, sighing heavily as though her inability to stop talking somehow pained her.

God, she would fit so well in his family, he realized with something close to terror before he managed to push that horrifying thought aside and just focus on how soft her skin was since he couldn’t help but notice how pretty she was when she wasn’t purposely trying to piss him off.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she pointed out as he shifted more comfortably on his side, careful not to put any weight on his left hand.

“Yet, you keep asking,” he murmured softly while he watched as the small, lightly tanned hand came to rest on top of his.

“How else am I supposed to entertain myself?” she asked with a mischievous little smile.

“By sleeping?” he suggested, still wondering why he was here when he could be in his own bedroom, enjoying the only downtime that he usually allowed himself.

“I’m not really tired,” she admitted with a sigh, sounding bored while he lay there frowning, because he wasn’t tired either.

He was always fucking exhausted.

When he wasn’t at the restaurant, he was going over paperwork, trying to make the numbers work, trying to make schedules work, testing new recipes for the restaurant and reading everything that he could get his hands on about business, marketing and anything he could to make his business better. Everything in his life was about the Fire & Brimstone.

Absolutely everything.

No matter where he was, or what he was doing, he was focused on his business. It was the main reason that none of his relationships lasted more than a month and why his mother kept an extra fork by her side when he visited just in case she needed to discretely stab him beneath the table if it looked like he was reaching for his phone.

He hadn’t really used anything that he’d learned yet, but he would. He just wanted to make sure that everything was perfect, but in order to do that he needed to have a plan and that was going to take time.

“So?”

“So, what?” he asked, suddenly feeling uncomfortable about lying here when there was about a million other things that he should be doing.

“Why does everyone call you Lucifer?” she asked, shifting more comfortably against him. If it had been any other woman snuggling up next to him he would have just assumed that she wanted to be closer to him, but since this was the blanket hog, he knew that she was only trying to push him over so that she could hog the pillow.

“Because they don’t want to die,” he answered, refusing to move over since he was comfortable right where he was.

“So, you gave yourself that nickname?” she asked in a teasing tone that he refused to find adorable.

“No,” he said with the glare that he found most effective in shutting someone up.

Unfortunately for him, he was trying to use it on the only person in the world who could care less that he was seriously contemplating her death. Maybe he should gag her? he idly wondered as she shifted so that she could look at him during her interrogation.

“So, then how did you get it?” she asked, folding her arm beneath her head to get more comfortable.

Since it was obvious that she wasn’t going to give up until she got her answers, he decided that it was time to call it a night. Only thing was, he didn’t want to leave. For the first time since he could remember he wasn’t in a rush to get back to work. He didn’t want to go finish that article on time saving scheduling that he’d started this morning