Page 43 of Blind Luck

“Because you’re the client.”

“You keep saying that, but am I really? The use of Mav’sspare room in exchange for a helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon doesn’t seem like a fair trade to me. If anything, Mav’s the client.”

“Well, he’s not here, is he?”

Rusty tried a smile. “Did I earn a few brownie points with the dog thing?”

“Those brownie points belong to Sin.”

“She’d definitely kick me in the balls.”

“She’d probably bite them off,” Erin said.

“Yeah, you’re right.” Rusty’s inbuilt sense of self-preservation stopped him from getting tangled up with a woman like Sin. Mav and his kamikaze streak might make a pass at her, though. “I swear I won’t touch you again. It’s just that I had no sweater to give you, and I didn’t want you to get cold. Back home in Minnesota, the girls would always snuggle when we hung out in winter. I figured… I figured wrong.”

“Really? Guys and girls hung out together?”

Where had she been that they didn’t? A girls-only boarding school?

“All the time in high school. It was normal.”

She crossed her arms. “Well, I wouldn’t know. I never went to high school.”

“You were homeschooled?”

“I guess you could call it that.”

“But you got your GED, right? You’re smart.”

“No GED, but I can recite the Bible from cover to cover. And I’m not even kidding about that.”

“You were raised in a religious household?”

“I was a child of God, at least until I quit the organisation. Now I have a one-way ticket to hell.” A tear rolled down Erin’s cheek. Fuck. “Can we skip talking about this?”

“Sure,” Rusty agreed, although he was burning with curiosity. “Now that you’re awake, you can wrap theblanket around your back and then it won’t keep falling off.”

Erin was possibly the most interesting woman he’d ever met, but when he began peeling away her layers like an onion, it wasshewho cried. He was beginning to understand why Ari was so protective of her.

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Nothing,” she said. Then, “Is that weird? Sitting in silence? Yup, it’s weird. Let’s talk about you.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Uh, your entire life story? From small-town Minnesota to earning squillions of dollars playing for the California Commanders? I mean, that has to be one hell of a journey.”

“I was hoping we wouldn’t be here all night.”

“Okay, you can skim over the boring parts. What’s it like in Minnesota?”

“Cold.”

“That’s it? Cold? You just froze into an ice cube every winter and thawed in the spring?”

“In the winter, the lake in our yard froze over and we went ice skating. That’s where I got my taste for hockey.”

“You had a freaking lake in your backyard?”

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