Page 31 of Burn for You

I roll my eyes.

“And anyway, Marina has put me on home detention for thenext two weeks. She wants me to take some time before I go back to work.” It makes sense considering everything that she’s been through in the past forty-eight hours. It’s almost concerning how relaxed she seems after everything that’s happened. But if her coping mechanism is to focus on other things, then who am I to judge? My own mechanisms aren’t much better.

“Oh, goodie.”

I can feel her glare through the back of my head as I walk to the back of the car. “I’m not any happier about this than you are, okay?”

I scoff. “Yeah, you’ve made that clear, Whitley.” That came out a bit more sour than I’d intended.

“Good.”

“Good,” I mock.

She huffs, and I see her stand in my peripheral vision. “By the way, you missed a spot.”

“Where?” I ask.

“Just…” She dips her fingers into the bucket of the now dirty water, flicking the filthy gray liquid over the freshly cleaned hood. “There.”

I slowly turn my head to look at her, and I get a glimpse of her satisfied smirk before she turns and strides back inside the house.

I’m going to kill this girl before her two weeks are up.

chapter thirteen

MAY

It’s beenover a week since I moved into Rafael’s enormous house, and I’ve barely seen him since.

He really took the whole keep out of each other's way thing literally, but I can’t exactly complain. It’s precisely what I asked for.

It’s just that being in this house is lonely; I don’t know how he does it every day without going crazy.

The high ceilings, and white walls, and the huge silver fridge, it all just makes me wish I was back in my tiny cottage with a blanket and a mug of hot chocolate. Not that I’ve had any hot drinks since I’ve been here. I’m too scared to turn the kettle on.

I open the fridge and close it again. There’s no food in this house. There are just ingredients, nothing I can just take out of the fridge and eat. I guess that’s what you get living with a chef, but I feel like a snack every once in a while, and instead I’m left drinking water to fill my cravings. Surprise surprise, it’s not really working.

I place an order for a pizza from Antonio’s for delivery. It’s arriving in half an hour, so I take the time to wander around the huge house I’m currently calling home. It doesn’t sound right, even in my own head.

I’m so glad that the fire didn’t spread to my bedroom, because I’ve needed my fuzzy socks being here. The concrete floors are freezing on my bare feet, so I’m constantly sliding around in my socks. If I wasn’t afraid of Rafael catching me, I’d be sliding down the hallways dancing like Hugh Grant in Love Actually.

Speaking of the grump, Rafael is out at the restaurant this morning, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to do some snooping.

But there’s nothing to snoop through.

As I walk around the big living room, there are no family photos. No mementos from his childhood, nothing. Not even any knick-knacks on the mantelpiece of the gigantic fireplace.

God how I’d like to get my hands on this place. I’m dying to put some books on some shelves, or place a pot plant by the window, but Rafael might literally draw and quarter me if I so much as leave a glass on the table. The place is pristine. Clinically pristine, there’s no life here.

You’d barely even know someone was living in this house if not for Rafael’s truck that he parks out the front, and occasionally cleans half naked. That’s the one thing I can appreciate about being here. Despite his horrible attitude, he’s got a deadly gorgeous body.

I slump back down on the couch, not knowing what to do with myself. Marina has given me the last two weeks off work to get my head right before I come back in, but I’ve been bored shitless without my shifts at the bar with nothing to distract my mind. I’ve tried to pick up a book to take my mind somewhere other than here, but the one I chose was a forced proximity, roommates trope, and that hit a little too close to home for my current circumstances.

I reach for the back of the couch for a blanket that’s not there. Why doesn’t he have any blankets? That's psychotic.

I huff a sigh as I get up off the couch and make the trip to my room. This place is like something from a horror movie. All the doors shut down the long straight hallway, it creeps me out.

I push the door open to my room and immediately feel better. All the stuff from the cottage is scattered around the room and it feels so much warmer than the rest of the house. Like I’ve stepped through the wardrobe into Narnia.

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