“Bluh,” she replied.
His smile got bigger and he shoved his face deeper into her hair.
Thick. Soft.
Fuck.
“Not a morning person?” he asked.
“I like sleep.”
“Then go back to it.”
“Are you gonna leave?”
He shifted his head back an inch.
They were just starting out; he didn’t know her all that well.
But he’d been paying attention to her for months, straight-up following her for a while, and everything about her said she was a together person.
Not a lot fazed her.
In other words, suddenly, he was seeing her request he stay last night, and what she just said, in a different light.
“No, I’m not gonna leave,” he answered, then put a hand to her stomach, moving enough to give her body room, before he pressed her to her back, coming up to a forearm to look down at her. “We’re gonna have brunch.”
She wasn’t meeting his eyes. “All right.”
“Ryn,” he called.
Her gaze skittered to his.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she answered.
“You were kidnapped the other night,” he noted carefully.
“It really wasn’t that bad.”
“Ryn—”
“I don’t wanna be that woman,” she blurted.
He said nothing for a beat, before he asked, “What woman?”
“The needy, clinging one.”
“What do you need?”
“It’s stupid.”
“Nothing’s stupid.”
“Any and all brands of fat jokes are stupid.”
He felt his mouth quirk. “Okay. I’ll give you that.”
“Texting while driving is stupid.”
“I’ll give you that too.”
“Letting white sexual assaulters off with a slap on the wrist while incarcerating to the fullest extent of the law Black dudes who are caught with a bag of weed is the epitome of stupid.”
“Are you gonna ask me to go on a social crusade?”
Her face changed.
Big, blue, sleepy eyes going guarded, she whispered, “The last couple of days have been super sucky.”
“Baby,” he murmured.
“And okay, I haven’t told this to anybody, because there was a lot of shit going down for Evie, and I didn’t want to worry anyone…but being caught in a firefight in the Cherry Creek parking garage was all kinds of unfun.”
Shit.
He fell to his back wrapping an arm around her so he could pull her up on his chest.
When he had her where he wanted her, he deduced, “Seeing Cisco again was a trigger.”
“Our chat really wasn’t that bad. And since I’m letting it all hang out, truthfully, as whacked as this is gonna sound, he seems like an okay guy.”
“Gotta say, considering what I know about him, that is pretty whacked, babe. Because he is not an okay guy.”
“What I’m saying is, considering the fact that he kinda, sorta promised he’d never hurt me, it’s stupid that I’m feeling…vulnerable.”
“You do know that really is not at all stupid,” he stated inflexibly.
“But, Boone—”
He gave her a squeeze. “Quiet and listen to me, Kathryn.”
She shut her mouth.
“You were betrayed by a family member. Not in a little way, in a big one. No bones about it, she stole from you time and money, a lot of both, and she did it for years. And when you called her on it, she took from you something that’s more important than all that. Your brother is up in your shit about it. You had to share it with your mom, which is insult to injury, ’cause then you had to deal with your mother’s reaction. And none of that is little shit, sweetheart. That’s a lot to deal with.”
Her mouth worked but she didn’t say anything.
So Boone kept going.
“And yeah, you were being held by people demonstrating an intent to harm you and were caught in the middle of a firefight. You know how I reacted when I was in my first firefight?”
Those big blue eyes got bigger. “Your first one?”
He gave her another squeeze. “Ryn, focus.”
“Okay, what did you do?”
“Froze.”
She made no response.
“It was during a mission. I had a team all around me who were counting on me to play my part, and I fucking froze. Didn’t get off that first shot. My commanding officer lost his shit on me after and every guy in my squad acted like I was a speck of dirt. But I felt smaller than that. Even with that, the bottom line is, there was so much goddamn noise and chaos, bullets were flying, bullets kill people, and I did not want to die. I had training and it’s arguable I should have reacted better, but finally a bud approached on the down low and told me he did the same thing his first time. I still felt like an asshole, but when he told me that, I felt less of one. It never happened again but it’s human nature.”
He reached up, pulled her hair around her neck so it was falling down one side, then tangled his fingers in it.
“You didn’t have training, Ryn,” he told her gently. “You were shopping one second with your girls and in a hail of bullets the next. Let yourself react to that. And if your reaction includes wanting me to stay close for a while, I’m not gonna think that’s clingy or needy. I’m not gonna have an issue with that at all. Because I understand it seeing as it’s natural.”