Ryan (Mallick Brothers 2)

"Sufficient price of admission?" he asked, watching me.

"With this, I wouldn't even be mad if your motive was to come in here and rob me."

"The only thing I'm stealing is more of those Polish cookies of yours," he said and I realized I had left them in the kitchen.

"Oh, right," I said, moving to bolt off the couch only to find his large palm pressing down on my thigh right above my knee, firm and unyielding, keeping me in place.

"Relax. I'll grab them," he said, pressing upward and moving across my apartment to do just that. He placed them down on the table then reached up to remove his suit jacket, leaving him in a very well tailored dark gray dress shirt with matte buttons.

"What do you do?" I found myself blurting out.

One of his brows rose slightly. "I own a couple businesses," he offered but, if I wasn't mistaken, there was a bit of a guardedness to his tone.

"Huh, maybe I order from you," I said with a smile, motioning toward where I had a few shipping boxes piled under my mail table.

"Not likely," he said, sitting back down and, I kid you not, putting his hand right back down on my thigh again like it was the most casual thing in the world. Like we sat that way all the time. "I own a jewelry store, an office building, a contracting business, part of a bar and, recently, the women's shelter."

"You own the women's shelter?" I asked immediately, it being the most interesting of the bunch.

"Just recently," he said with a shrug. "They were having financial issues in the beginning stages and because my brothers' women and my mom are all involved in it in various ways, we decided we needed to step in. I just happened to be in a better position to take it on than my brothers."

He struck me as the type to be good with money. We lived in a nice apartment building and while I knew he had made major adjustments to his apartment when he first moved in, it wasn't one of the most expensive in the area. He wore nice suits and watches, but he wasn't constantly having purchases delivered or bringing home bags of stuff.

He seemed married to his work.

Men like that usually had money to throw around on seventy dollar bottles of wine.

Even before the agoraphobia, on a teacher's salary, all that stuff was a pipe dream.

Besides, I was raised frugally. I wasn't materialistic.

"That is very... philanthropic of you."

"They do good things there," he said, shrugging it off.

They did more than good things. They changed lives. Owning it, having his family involved in it, he must have known that. When I read in the paper that they were building it, my first thought had been- it's about time. Growing up, moving around the way we always did, I had seen more than my fair share of battered women. And Navesink Bank had the added awfulness of men like Lex Keith and his God-awful track record with women to deal with.

Navesink Bank needed the women's shelter.

And Ryan, my sexy as all hell, sweet as could be neighbor made it possible for it to stay in business.

That said something about him.

"What?" he asked, head ducked to the side a little and I realized I had been staring at him.

Caught, I just went ahead and gave him the truth. "You're a pretty phenomenal person, Ryan Mallick," I said, giving him a small smile.

"Don't put me on a pedestal, honey. I'll knock the damn thing over in a fucking minute."

Again, there was that guardedness to his tone and face when he spoke, making me wonder what it was about him that made him feel that way about himself. I had come to the conclusion in his car that he was more than he appeared, more than a mere businessman if the scars were anything to go by, but what? What was he? What did he do?

They weren't exactly things I could ask him either.

As if to temper the comment, his hand squeezed my thigh again, reminding me that it was still there, drawing my gaze down, curious how it wasn't what was at the forefront of all my thoughts, human touch being such a foreign concept to me for so long.

"Want me to move it?" he asked, interpreting my inspection for discomfort.

"No," I said way too fast judging by the way his smile went bemused.

"Good," he said, shifting his attention to the TV.

So then we watched a movie and drank wine and he ate every last one of my chruscikis. And it was just about the most normal of nights, like we did it all the time, like I wasn't some shut-in freak who everyone else but her uncle had given up on because she was too 'difficult'.