Page 42 of Thornhill Road

“What—um—did you stay the whole night?” I stammered.

Mustang looked over at me, his eyes giving me a thorough once over before a half-smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Tess, you sleep like the dead.”

I blinked hard once, then reached up to run my fingers through my hair as I tried to make sense of what was happening. “Um, yeah—only when I’m really tried. It happens once every few weeks or so. But, back to my thing. Did you? Were you here all night?”

“No,” he answered, his attention back on the bacon. “Went to work. Hit the house to raid the fridge. Came back.”

“Came back,” I repeated on a whisper.

He left the bacon to cook, then shifted his attention to a skillet full of scrambled eggs.

Did I have eggs?

“Locked up when I left. Used your spare key. Found it in the first drawer I looked.” He paused, shot me a warning glance with those hazel-blue eyes and said, “Not a safe place to hide a key, sugar.” His attention back on the eggs, he assured me, “Don’t worry. Found a better spot for it.”

I was still too distracted to ask where. Instead, I begged to know, “Why? Why did you come back?”

“Fridge was scarce, Tess. You needed breakfast.”

“You’re—you’re making me breakfast,” I processed aloud.

Mustang frowned at me. “Baby, you need coffee to make sense in the morning or what?”

I gaped at him.

I didn’t understand how he thought I was the one not making sense.

He was the one who’d left, gone to work, raided a fridge, only to come back to make me breakfast. Except, I didn’t understand why—at four in the morning—he was in my kitchen making breakfast.

“What is happening?”

The timer on my stove sounded. He switched off the burner under the eggs, flipped the bacon, then used the tea towel that hung on the oven door to pull out a sheet of biscuits.

I was dreaming. There was no way in hell I was awake.

Badass bikers didn’t make breakfast at four in the morning. They just didn’t.

“You got jam? Only had syrup at my place.”

For a moment, I stood there and said nothing. Then, simply to test out my theory, I went to my fridge and took out a jar of strawberry jelly. I held it against my chest, the chill of the glass seeping through my shirt, alerting me to the reality that I was truly awake.

Having come to this conclusion, I asked again, “Mustang, what is happening? Why did you come back? Why are you making me breakfast?”

He looked at me from over his shoulder. “You take care of people all day. Who’s takin’ care of you?”

The air in my lungs left me in a whoosh.

I was in deep shit. No doubt about it.

Five words, and I was already falling.

Only, that was par for the course for me.

That didn’t explainhim.

I managed to recapture just enough breath in my lungs to murmur, “You…you hardly know me.”

Mustang scowled. “We back at that?”

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