Page 26 of A Beta Protects

I glance at Chloe as I join her at the dining table. “Me!”

Nick abandons scrutinizing his ingredients to roll his eyes at me. “Yes, you. You’re a guest here, so you’re the one I have to impress with my cooking.” He nods at Chloe. “The rest of them will eat any old thing I make them.”

Chloe barks out a laugh. “Jeez, make it sound like we’re a bunch of stray dogs sniffing around the trash, why don’t you?”

I can’t help but smile. “Uh, I’m okay with anything, really. But I’m not really hungry. Dom took me to Lacey’s Lemon Bar, and I had cake.”

“The lemon cake?” His eyes turn dreamy as he rests his hip on a kitchen counter.

“Is there any other kind of cake?” Chloe adds.

He shakes his head. “I keep trying to get the recipe out of her, but she’s like a clam with a pearl at the bottom of an ocean. One day.”

“I was hoping to work there,” I admit, briefly smiling at his comment, and hoping they might know of a way I could. When Chloe and Nick stare at me, I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. “Just to earn a bit of money while I’m here, you know?”

All I have to my name is a jaw of BBQ sauce.

Just because I haven’t seen anyone here going to work doesn’t mean they don’t contribute in some meaningful way. All I’ve done so far is steal Dom’s bed and fail to find a job.

Nick darts a rapid glance at my left hand and refocuses on his ingredients. He has a good mix of veggies, pantry staples, and carbs to make almost anything. “Well, I hope it works out. I could throw together some BLTs with fries?”

Relieved no one is asking me what I’m doing here, though they must all be curious, I consider if I have room in my belly for BLTs.

I literally ate an hour ago. Before that, I cleared my plate of eggs, bacon, and pancakes. There is absolutely no need for me to eat so soon after all the eating I’ve already done. But try telling my rumbling belly that.

I could be like a bear in winter, eating more than I need to get through the lean season when I leave.

“BLT’s sound good,” Chloe says. “But you have to make the fries dirty. Now I’ve had dirty, I can’t go back to ordinary.”

“What are dirty fries?” I ask as Nick returns items to the refrigerator and cupboards.

“Fries loaded with cheese sauce, onions and peppers, jalapenos, fresh herbs and tomatoes.” Nick looks me right in the eye. “You will never taste anything better than my dirty fries.”

“He’s not the least bit modest about his cooking, in case you didn’t notice.” Chloe’s voice is dry.

“That sounds good.” The only fry I know is the humble salted and dunked in ketchup. The dirty fry sounds like it might be an experience.

Chloe tilts her head as she studies me. “I told myself not to pry, but about you and Dom. You don’t have to tell me if?—”

“He told you nothing about me and you want to know how we know each other?” I interrupt.

She nods.

I’m equally curious about him, and about her. About all of the people who live here, actually.

Dom hasn’t told me how he knows these people or why he chose to live in a remote farmhouse, or even if he knew them before he moved to Missouri. He must not have, because why would he have been in Missouri when he could have been here with his friends in this beautifully renovated farmhouse with not one nosey neighbor?

“Dom was my big brother’s next-door neighbor for a while in Palmerston,” I explain. “He rented the house next to my brother’s, and then he joined the Marines.”

Chloe and Nick stare at me.

“He just decided to join the Marines?” Nick echoes. “Do people just decide like that?”

I blush. “Uh, I’m doing a terrible job of explaining this. My brother was a Marine. That’s why he joined. They were friends, so we’d see each other occasionally.”

Chloe sits back in her seat, her wrinkled brow smoothing away as Nick breathes, “Oh, that makes more sense. I guess.”

And Dom couldn’t wait to get away from me when he saw me, but that’s another story. One I keep to myself.

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