Page 70 of In The Trenches (Owens Protective Services)

I took the bag from him. “Oddly, that makes sense.”

“Of course it does. I said it. Now, what are we going to watch?”

“Uh, anything but a disaster movie. Or a bang, bang movie.”

He rolled his head toward me again and grinned. “I like the way you think.” He pulled the gun from the small of his back and set it on the nightstand. “This is loaded with pew pews, so don’t think about touching it. I don’t want my brains shot out.”

“And pew pews are bullets?” I guessed.

“See? You’re getting the hang of it. We’ll make you into an agent yet.”

“No thanks,” I muttered under my breath. “I just want to get out of here and live my life like a normal person. If that was possible.”

He looked at me strangely, then turned on the TV and flipped through his video catalog. It had been so long since I’d seen something like this. In all the places I stayed, I watched whatever the antennae allowed, which usually wasn’t much.

“Ah, here we go.”

The cursor landed onOklahoma. I glanced over at him, sure he was joking. “What is this?”

“Oklahoma. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen it.”

“I have, but what I don’t understand is whyyou’veseen it.”

“It’s a classic. I’ve seen this at least ten times on the stage.”

I gaped at the man laying beside me. How could a man like this, that looked like he killed people for fun, go to the theater? I scooted a little further on the bed.

“What was the last show you saw?”

“White Christmas. I dragged Cash to it,” he grinned. “Yeah, he pretended not to like it, but I caught him singing along in the truck on the way home.”

“Seriously?”

“Yep,” he laughed. “What about you? Last show you ever saw.”

I shook my head. “I never went.”

His jaw dropped in shock. “Never? That’s terrible. Didn’t your mom ever try to take you to one?”

I shoved some candy in my mouth to avoid answering his question, but the weight of his stare told me he wasn’t turning on the movie until he had an answer.

“Let’s just say my mother wasn’t exactly a great mother. There were no theaters—movie or otherwise—and the only reason I saw Oklahoma was because I had to spend the night at my friend’s house whenever she had over—”

I shut my mouth, almost forgetting for a minute where I was. Fox wasn’t my friend, even if he was pretending to be. Whatever this was, Cash probably sent him in here to soften me up. I was nothing more than a tool he needed, just like with Adam.

“Are we going to watch this or not?” I asked, sitting back against the pillows.

“The first one that sings along has to sleep in the chair,” he said, not bothering to face me.

“That should be easy since you love musicals so much.”

“Ah, but I have a high pain tolerance.”

“What does pain have to do with this?”

He shook his head like I was stupid. “Because it’s literally painful for me to not sing along. I thought that was obvious.”

This was going to be a long night. He started the movie, which I hadn’t seen in a long time. It wasn’t hard for me not to sing along, because I hardly remembered any of it. But I was instantly lost in the music, almost like I was in another reality. One in which I had a boyfriend and this was a regular Friday night for us. We’d be snuggled up in bed as a movie played. We’d eat popcorn and laugh at the movie, and everything would be perfectly normal.

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