Page 26 of The Red Rider
“Well, yeah. I wouldn’t be alive right now if it weren’t for you.”
“Do you trust me?” Leif asked.
“Yeah. I trust both of you.”
“You agreed to come with me in that hospital with almost no questions asked. After we explained things, you gave Leif your blood because you trusted he could end this with it. I know you don’t know Dice as well as you know us, but why didn’t you trust us when we said Dice could do everything he promised with his bombs?”
“Because instead of just telling me all the bombs here were decommissioned, you kept up the whole joke because you liked my reaction!”
“No, I mean, even if it were true that there were still active bombs here. You didn’t remember me, but I said we needed to go to Mexico, so you followed me. You didn’t ask nearly as many questions as someone with no memories should have. I said there was a man you didn’t remember in Mexico who could make a cure with your blood. You didn’t kick me in the balls and run. You still came. You questioned us about Dice way more than you ever suspected anything about Leif and me.
“It’s not just the bombs. You could have died several times over on the road. You could have stayed in the safety of California with Miss Mabel. Leif could have had ill intentions and made things worse with your blood. You trusted us, but you never gave Dice that same trust when we kept telling you that you would be fine in Florida. You trusted us on mostly blind faith.”
I gulped. Aeron was right. I had done a lot of crazy shit since I met Aeron. Aeron could have been one of the cannibal rapists in the world, but I left the facility with him. I could have stayed in Gabriel’s Haven, but I followed him. I could have stayed behind the walls in California, but I just trusted Leif wasn’t going to make things worse with my blood.
Even if they hadn’t told me the truth right away, why didn’t I accept their answer? I was there when Aeron killed five trucks of Nazis and dazed a ton of Rage Heads so we could kill them with his angel powers. Leif made a vaccine and a killing serum way faster than was humanly possible.
Why did I continuously question that the Horseman of War couldn’t handle bombs?
I mean, Aeron was the Horseman of Death, and I’d seen him in action. Leif was the Horseman of Pestilence, and I was in the lab with him when he had success. I’d seen two Horsemen in action do the impossible. Why didn’t I see it before? I was still mad they didn’t just tell me, but even if there were active bombs here, the Horseman of War was probably the best person on the entire planet to be fiddling with them.
I totally deflated, and I was about to do something I didn’t think I was going to do when I decided to get mad about them not telling me the truth.
“Dice, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you by flipping out about the bombs. I mean, you were able to organize the remaining military to steal them successfully. I should have just gone with that instead of thinking you didn’t know what you were doing.”
Dice didn’t seem to be the slightest bit angry with me. In fact, he wasn’t even looking at me. He was eye-fucking that pig roasting on the spit. Okay, that was just insulting. Dice finally started paying more attention to me than the dead pig.
“I’m not mad at you, Ariel. I found the whole thing funny, and it gave us a reason to talk. I guess one of the reasons I didn’t just tell you right off is because it meant I got to talk to you more. Sure, you ran to Aeron and Leif for comfort, but it meant you spent more time with me before you went to bed with them.”
“It felt weird having you on the couch, even when we first met,” I admitted. “It felt like we were leaving you out.”
“It meant a lot to me when you invited me, and I hope you don’t mind I demanded snuggle time at night.”
Did that bother me? It actually didn’t. Dice had proved to be this tremendous help getting my memories back, and he was just so easy to talk to. There was something about his appearance that gave off this air of danger, and hewasdangerous if he could just waltz in and steal all the bombs in an entire country.
Something wasn’t right. We shouldn’t snuggle in bed at night when we hadn’t done something fundamental first. Aeron and Leif had to grab their beers as I crawled across the picnic table and slid into Dice’s lap. Every single soldier around us started cheering and hooting. I wrapped my arms around his neck and shoved my boobs as far into his face as I could. His hands snaked around me to cup my ass.
“Well, hello.”
“We can’t get all cuddly at night until we’ve had our first kiss.”
Dice nuzzled my neck.
“Just in time. The pig is almost done, and I plan on destroying as much of it as they will let me. I wouldn’t want to do this with pig breath. We can have a nice strawberry kiss.”
“Well, when you put it like that…”
Dice buried his fingers in my hair and pulled me down for a kiss. I forgot about everything around me. It was amazing. It was passionate, and it tasted like strawberries. Neither of us cared a bunch of hooting soldiers surrounded us. The more Dice caressed my tongue with his, the more I wanted him to do the whole angel teleport thing and whisk me back to his bedroom.
Of course, my stomach had to choose right then to go and betray me. Why did food have to happen when I was straddling the Horseman of War? He wasn’t anything like Aeron or Leif, but he had one thing in common with them. As soon as he heard my stomach start screaming, he broke the kiss and was going to make sure I had food.
“How are we coming on that pig? My woman is hungry!” he yelled, smacking me on the ass.
That should have pissed me off, but coming from Dice, it just didn’t.
“Carving it up now, boss.”
Dice didn’t seem to want to let me out of his lap, and I wasn’t complaining about that.
