Page 47 of Keep You Close

Maybe I was projecting a bit there.

“She’d be better with someone a lot kinder and sweeter,” I told Tucker, wondering if I were being too obvious or possibly too vague.

“I agree,” he said.

“Someone who likes the simple things in life, like she and her girls do.”

That seemed to get his attention.

“She wouldn’t want me,” Tuck said, shaking his head.

“Why not?”

“I live in my van.”

“By choice.”

“It’s still a van.”

“It’s not like you’d ask her to move into it with you,” I said, shrugging. “She has her own place.”

“It’s… she doesn’t see me that way,” he said, turning to go behind the desk. “So, have the dogs gone out yet?”

Right.

Time to let it go.

Obviously, I was no matchmaker.

Hell, I couldn’t even control my own love life.

“They were all passed out the last time I checked the cameras.”

“Alrighty. I can have my breakfast first them,” he said, producing a glass container with what looked like cold, mushy oats coated in… I don’t know… some kind of black seeds.

Everything he ate was entirely too healthy for me.

“Go on. Go get some sleep. You look dead on your feet.”

“I am,” I admitted, gathering my things, then rousing Samson, and heading out, thinking of my bed until I started fantasizing about Atlas in it with me, then I needed to tamp all that back down and just focus on the road ahead of me.

I went in through the back, giving Samson a second to go potty, then sneaking in the back door, figuring it was the least likely to wake up Atlas.

Only to find him wide awake, sitting in the kitchen, holding a plate of pancakes topped with a white flag that he’d made out of a skewer and cut and taped napkin.

“Oh, right, I’m supposed to wave it,” he said, moving the plate side to side for a second.

“You made me pancakes?” I asked, feeling a ridiculous sting of tears in my eyes.

No one had cooked for me. Not since I moved out of my parent’s house. Definitely never a man.

“Don’t give me too much credit. I bought them, stuck them in the fridge, then heated them up when I saw your lights in the driveway,” he admitted.

He looked like he’d slept. His dark hair was disheveled and his white tee was wrinkly. But it looked like he’d been up for a bit.

Waiting for me?

I didn’t want it to, but my heart squeezed a bit at that possibility.

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