Page 94 of The Love Bandits

Now, it’s time to put that knowledge to use, even if I feel a little…hesitant.

I haven’t taken anything that’s not mine for months.

Staying at the cabin this last week, I’ve dared to think about what a different kind of life might be like. A life in which I can feed my need for adrenaline by helping people instead of harming them.

I pace until the floorboards creak beneath me. I’d fix them, but I don’t know how. My whole life, no one’s ever taught me tofixanything. Only how to take.

It’s a thought that makes me pace harder, until I Google how to fix creaking floorboards and find an answer too complicated to wrap my restless brain around. Professor X is as twitchy as I am, pacing beside me, mewing enough that I feed her a second breakfast she doesn’t touch.

I tell myself it’s always like this before I steal something.

But I know the truth: part of me doesn’t want to find the real Heart of the Mountain. Because once I do, this will all be over.

Elaine has told me multiple times that Damien and Nicole will help me, but I’m unconvinced. At the end of the day, she’s their friend and Mrs. Rosings is her boss. They might convince her to do the right thing and return the necklace to the old lady. Still, I don’t know if I have it in me to steal it out from under her and leave without a word.

A part of me also recognizes that stealing Mrs. Rosings’s necklace is only a temporary solution to a much larger problem. I don’t think Roark is just going to let us wander off into the good night and do our thing.

He doesn’t want to let us go.

This whole mess is about him not accepting my choice.

We’re important to him, although not for the reasons I let myself believe once.

Even if I’m able to convince Ryan that we have to both go legit, Roark’s going to find a way to tug us back in. And, if I’m very unlucky, he might find out that I care about Elaine and decide he wants to use her against me too.

You’re falling in love with her.

The thought passes through my mind like fluff from a blown dandelion, catching and sticking, ready to sprout five hundred new dandelions like a pestilence. It should be impossible. A man shouldn’t be able to fall in love with a woman he’s known for two weeks.

Leave it to me to go my whole life without falling in love with a woman and then to leap into it like I’m cliff-jumping, without any sense of survival.

When my phone rings at around four with a call from Anthony Rosings Smith, it almost comes as a relief. I’m so desperate to talk to anyone that he’ll do.

I nearly fumble the phone in my need to answer it.

“Hey, man, what’s up?” I say, continuing to pace across the living room floor, the creaks and squeaks rising up in the same places with each pass.

“I was wondering if you could get a drink tonight instead of tomorrow.” He sounds like I feel—hopped up on nerves and adrenaline, which stirs my curiosity. Did he find the necklace in his fiancée’s things? If he did, would he tell a guy he’d known for three weeks?

Here’s to hoping.

“What time?” I ask, my brow furrowing. Elaine and I are supposed to break into his house tonight. Does this mean he’s cancelled his plan to attend that god-awful play with his mother and fiancée?

He swears under his breath. “There’s somewhere I need to be at seven. I don’t suppose…”

“I’m free,” I say. Glancing at the wall clock—4 p.m.—I say, “My last client just left. Where do you want to go, the peanut bar?”

His laugh rumbles across the line. “You must think I’m absurd, choosing a place like that.”

“Maybe you just have a thing for peanuts. I hear they’re popular with jelly.”

“I don’t. It’s… There’s something I have to get off my chest, and I don’t want to be overheard by anyone I know.”

“So not a lot of peanut fans in your life, got it,” I say.

He pauses, and I can practically hear his crank turning on the other side of the line. “You’re still seeing my mother’s assistant.”

I nod, then realize he can’t very well see me. “I am.”

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