Chapter 8
RAMPAGE
He found her at the kitchen table at nine that night with her laptop open, spreadsheet on the screen, reading glasses on, which were cute as hell, doing what appeared to be her actual job.
He stopped in the doorway.
"What?" she said, without looking up.
"Nothing."
"You're doing the doorway thing."
"I don't have a doorway thing."
"You absolutely have a doorway thing. You stand in them and observe people like you're assessing a situation." She looked up over the top of her glasses. "I'm not a situation. I'm doing invoices."
"What do you do?"
"I run a yoga business during the day and do freelance bookkeeping at night.
" She turned back to the screen. "Very unglamorous.
But it pays well when I need some extra money and I can do it anywhere, which is convenient given that I had to bring in a substitute to teach my classes and my apartment is apparently not somewhere I can be right now. "
He pulled out the chair across from her and sat down. She glanced up, something in her eyes registering the proximity, and then looked back at her screen.
He poured himself coffee. Didn't say anything. He knew he should probably cut back on the coffee, but life is short and there were worse vices. The club always had a fresh pot of coffee brewing. It didn’t matter what time of day or night it was.
Men were always at the gate which meant there was always good coffee available.
If you took the last cup, you brewed the next pot. It was an unwritten rule.
After about two minutes, she said, "This doesn't bother you? Just sitting here?"
"No."
"Most people feel the need to fill the silence."
"Most people are uncomfortable with themselves."
She considered that. "Fair point." She typed something. "Are you always up late?"
"Usually."
"Why?"
"Habit."
She looked at him over the glasses again. She reminded him of a naughty librarian. He needed to keep his imagination to himself. "Delta Force habit or something else?"
"Both."
She nodded slowly, like she was filing that. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"No."
"Okay." She went back to her spreadsheet without missing a beat. Her ability to not push for more of an answer but accept it at face value landed somewhere it shouldn't have. She wasn’t the type of woman to nag or to demand more than he could give. He respected that.
They sat in quiet with the clock on the wall ticking loudly and somewhere down the hall Irish was watching television at a volume that suggested he might have some hearing loss from all the combat operations he’d survived.
"Can I ask you something?" Emily said.
"Yes."
"Savannah and her—" She stopped. Started differently. "The dynamic here. Between some of the couples." She closed her laptop halfway. "Is that something you… is that a club thing, or is it—"
"It’s something very personal to each person," he said. "But also club-wide. We’re all Daddies. It isn’t a requirement for membership, just like finding like."
"And you all know about it."
"I know about everything in my club."
She took her glasses off and set them on the table. "Savannah said something to me this morning," she said. "And Nicole. And the way everyone is around me is—" She stopped again. Pressed her lips together. "I feel like everyone here knows something about me that I haven't said out loud."
Rampage looked at her across the table. The kitchen light was low and warm. She had a small scar above her left eyebrow, he'd noticed. Her coffee had gone cold an hour ago and she hadn't touched it.
"Maybe they recognize something," he said carefully.
"Because of the book club."
"Partly."
"And partly because of—" She stopped. Her jaw shifted. She was working up to something. He waited, the same way he'd wait on any approach, with the complete stillness that came from knowing that the wrong movement could send it sideways.
"I read a lot," she said finally. "Certain kinds of books. And I've always told myself it was just entertainment. Just something I liked. But being here, seeing Savannah, and the way you—" Her eyes came to his and then away. "You said good girl twice today and both times it felt like—"
She stopped.
Rampage didn't move.
"Like something I'd been waiting to hear," she said, very quietly. Like she was confessing something she hadn't meant to confess. "And that's terrifying. And you should probably know that I think that's terrifying, and I don't know what to do with it."
The kitchen was completely quiet.
"You don't have to do anything with it," he said. "Not tonight."
She let out a breath. "That's it? That's all you're going to say?"
"What did you want me to say?"
"I don't know. Something that makes it less—" She gestured vaguely. "Much."
"It's not less anything," he said. "It's what it is. And it'll still be what it is tomorrow, and you don't have to figure it out tonight."
She stared at him. "How are you so calm about everything?"
"I'm not calm about everything."
"Name one thing that rattles you."
He looked at her across the kitchen table, at the reading glasses on the table next to her cold coffee, and the small scar above her eyebrow, and the expression on her face that was equal parts terrified and determined.
At the face of a woman standing at the edge of something and trying to decide if stepping off the edge was worth it.
"Emily, you have had a lot dropped on you in a day. You don’t have to figure it all out at once.”
"I know."
She picked up her glasses. Put them back on. Opened her laptop.
He drank his coffee.
They sat there for another hour. She finished her invoices. He went through the security rotation schedule for the rest of the week. Irish's television got incrementally louder and then abruptly silent, which meant Makenzie had gotten involved.
When Emily finally closed the laptop and stood up, she picked up both coffee mugs and took them to the sink. Rinsed them. Turned around.
"Goodnight, Rampage," she said.
"Night."
She got to the doorway. Stopped.
"For the record," she said, to the door frame rather than to him, "you did answer. You just answered something I didn't ask." She paused. "I noticed."
Then she was gone, and he sat in the empty kitchen with the clock ticking, and he thought about the look on her face when he'd said good girl the second time.
The flicker of excitement there and gone.
She felt the words and was trying to decide if she liked them or not.
Her body told him the answer. She liked it.
She'd figure that out.
He picked up his phone and texted Irish: Security rotation, you're on first. Six AM.
Irish responded immediately: Bringing Clover with me.
Clover is a dog. He’s not a second.
Clover is a very alert dog. I’ll bring Blade.
Rampage set the phone down and shook his head. Irish always brought Clover on perimeter rotation. He’d bring another brother with him this time. They didn’t know enough about the men who were trying to grab his girl.
Upstairs, he heard a door close. He couldn’t be sure it was hers, but he suspected so.
He sat there in the kitchen for a long time after that. If he went upstairs before she was asleep, there was a good chance he’d knock on the door and tell her everything she wanted to hear. Yes, he is a Daddy. Yes, he wanted to be her Daddy. No, he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
And yes, there was something that rattled him. The thought of her leaving before she came to the conclusion on her own or something happening to her. That thought rattled the hell out of him but he wasn’t ready to admit it out loud. Not to her. Not to himself.