Page 54 of The Love Scam
“Okay, then.” She went, docile as he’d never seen her, climbed in knees-first, like a little kid, and then flopped over on her back. He pulled the blankets up
(don’t kiss her)
(God I want to kiss her)
to her chin and in the dim glow from the ambient light, he could see her blinking up at him. Her eyes were already going half-lidded as she started to slip back under.
“There! Now you can go back to sleep. For as long as you want. This isyourroom. The only people in here are the onesyousay can be here.”
“Rake can stay here,” she said, startling the holy hell out of him. “He’s nice. When he wants. You know?”
“Yeah, he’s not a total asshole one hundred percent of the time, it’s true,” he agreed. This, then, was what people meant when they talked about damning with faint praise. “Sweet dreams, Delaney. I mean that literally: only good dreams for you. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said, and closed her eyes.
He’d never wanted to crawl into bed with someone so badly in his life, and that included the night he’d watched aJawsmarathon when he was ten. Blake’s comfort
(“For God’s sake, we live in a desert!Carcharodon carchariaswould have to escape from the ocean, find an airport, fly into McCarron International, and then take a cab to our apartment before consuming you!”)
somehow didn’t get the job done. His mom didn’t yell, or laugh, though. Just scooted over to make room, and read with the light on until he fell asleep.
But this. This thing with Delaney. This was something else. He’d never wanted to comfort and snuggle with someone like this. He never minded when the one-night stands spent the night, but he felt no actual connection with them, and he was fine when they left, which, naturally, they all did at one point, even when the one-night stand took six months.
You’re getting it bad, Rake.
Yup.
When you get your money back, you can hire a platoon of private investigators and track some of these assholes down.
Definitely.
Thirty
It was hard to remember how much he wanted to sleep with Delaney when she woke him up
(“It’s so early I don’t know what time it is.”
“It’s four-forty-fiveA.M., ya big baby.”
“I’ve only been up this early when I haven’t gone to bed yet.”
“Shut up.”)
and shooed him from his uncomfortable sofa bed to work at San Basso, which once was a church but was deconsecrated and turned into, respectively, (a) a haunted house, (b) a post office, and now (c) a charity. Why Sofia and Delaney thought he would find this at all interesting at any time, never mind the wee hours, was a mystery.
And Lillith was a morning person. Yegods.
“So, what?” he asked, yawning. He made noises of gratitude when Elena handed him a cup of coffee, Lillith a cup of hot chocolate (at least he hoped it was), then hiked up her navy blue skirt (the hem was a prudent two inches below her knee; Elena scolded and dressed like a fifties housewife)and climbed into the van’s driver’s seat. “Meals on Wheels? What? And the reason we couldn’t start at noon is…”
“Colomba di Pasqua,”Delaney replied, “and lots of it.”
“Dunno what that is.”
“And we do not start at noon because we are not lazy Americans,” came Teresa’s pert reply.
“Whoa! Too early for generalizing!”
Delaney ignored that, all of it, his yelp and Teresa’s cruelty. “While you’re doing that—”
