“Hey,” I greeted him, smiling. “You look better.”
He smiled sheepishly, tucking a piece of hair behind his ear. “I feel better than I have in a week,” he confessed. “I’m so happy to see you.”
I grinned at him. “Where else would I be?”
“Well, you weren’t there when I woke up, so I was worried.”
“There when he woke up?” Rais repeated. “Damn, Shaw, I misjudged the strength of your game, man.”
“Shuddup,” I groused at Rais, but I kept my eyes on Benji as I repeated my promise to him. “I told you I’m not going anywhere until I find whoever is targeting you.”
“I know, and I shouldn’t have been concerned you’d be gone, but when you have a habit of leaving in the night yourself, you start suspecting everyone else of the same kind of behavior.”
“Understood,” I murmured, “but you don’t have to worry about that with me.”
He nodded in reply, and then glanced at Rais.
“Benji, this is my buddy Rais, and he’s here to set up the security system so I can get more than a couple hours of sleep a night while I’m here.”
He gasped and crossed the room to me, clasping my hand in both of his and staring up into my face. “Is that why you weren’t in bed?”
I glanced at Rais, who was doing a great impression of someone trying not to listen, and then back to Benji. “If I’d crawled in bed with you, I would have slept like a log. That can’t happen, so I made myself comfortable on the couch.”
“That’s not likely,” Benji assured me with a chuckle. “The couch is horrible.”
“Yeah, I can vouch for that.”
“Where’s your laptop?” Rais asked me.
I pointed toward the kitchen. “On the table. I was writing my progress report for Jared last night.”
“He seems nice,” Benji whispered once Rais was out of our immediate vicinity. “And he’s very handsome.”
“Yes, he is.”
He took a breath. “Does he live in Chicago too?”
“Yeah, why?”
There was throat clearing then. “Well, it’s just that he came a long way to deliver a security system only to turn right back around and go home.”
I nodded. “It’s what we do. We’re a team.”
“I see.”
Cupping his chin, I stared into his eyes. “Ask your question.”
Soft cough. “Are you and he possibly more than friends?”
I chuckled. “No, Benji Grace, we’re not anything more than friends.”
Long exhale. “Good. That’s very good, because there’s no competing with that. Did he model before he went to work for Torus?”
I snorted. “That man is a scary-ass ex-Army Ranger, so maybe don’t mention that you think he could walk a runway, all right?”
“Okay yeah, no,” he agreed. “Alpha men don’t like that kind of thing.”
I wrapped him up in my arms and hugged him. It wasn’t like me to spontaneously hug someone I wasn’t related to, but he was huggable, and he fit against me like a glove. He melted into the embrace, leaning, letting me hold him, both his hands flat on my chest.
“I forgot how much I love this,” he murmured. “This is the safest I’ve ever felt in my life.”
I smiled into his hair. “What’s on your agenda today after I make breakfast?”
“No, we don’t have time for you to make breakfast,” he instructed me, his head lifting so I could see his face. “We have to meet Sian and Delly at a cleansing in half an hour. After that, we can have breakfast at the pub.”
“No breakfast?”
“No, Pippin,” he teased me, “we have to work first.”
I scowled at him.
“You should ask your friend if he wants to come with us.”
“To do what?” Rais asked, leaning out the kitchen doorway.
I couldn’t wait to tell him.
Rais ended up staying behind at the house to install the security system. He didn’t like some of the angles and needed to get up into the attic and onto the roof and have Owen test the cameras from his end.
“Don’t fall,” I warned him on the way out the door.
He snorted and muttered something that sounded a lot like, “Yeah, sure, you either,” so I grabbed Benji and hustled him out the door before things got weird.
“I think Rais had a retort?” Benji teased me in the car, hand on my thigh. He liked touching me, and I couldn’t complain.
“What? No.”
“You’re a terrible liar, and I like that about you.”
I grunted.
“What did Rais say? I couldn’t hear him, what with you pushing me out the door.”
I exhaled sharply. “He might’ve been about to remind me of the last time we worked a job together. I fell through a skylight, and if he hadn’t been there, the thirty-foot drop would’ve been bad.”
“Oh my God.” He sounded horrified.
“Yeah. He’s not the one who loses his balance, so I’m sure he was about to give it to me with both barrels.”
“He seems nice.”
I scoffed. “Really? You got nice from him?”