when it happened again: Delaney went from deep, motionless sleep to moving-around sleep. She sat up and, like last time, went straight to the window.
This time he was right behind her. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re safe.”
“Really?” God, the hope in her tone! Like she wanted to believe but was afraid to.
“Yeah. No question.”
She pulled her gaze from the window and looked through him. “I can leave anytime?”
“Anytime you want. And you can go anywhere you want, too,” he added firmly. “Nobody can stop you. You’re not trapped here.” With me.
“Oh.” She smiled at him in the dark. “That’s a relief. I don’t like it when I can’t leave. Sometimes they won’t let me.”
“Not anymore.” Don’t touch her. Don’t hug her. Don’t wake her up. All of these, he figured, would be bad. Wasn’t there an old wives’ tale about how waking someone up while they were sleepwalking makes them go crazy? Blake would know. He could use some of Blake’s healthy skepticism right about now. “You’ll never be trapped again. And—” Inspiration hit. “And neither will the kids you’re helping. Sofia’s not trapped, either. You saved her from that.” Saved yourself from that. “Okay?”
“I can go back to bed? Nobody will … do anything?”
Why was it so fucking dusty in here? It was a nice hotel, but the dust was making his eyes water. Time to talk to housekeeping; this was unacceptable.
“Course not,” he soothed, steering her back to bed without actually touching her. It worked! (He had no idea how.)
“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 is your room. The only people in here are the ones you say 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 a Jaws marathon when he was ten. Blake’s comfort
(“For God’s sake, we live in a desert! Carcharodon carcharias would 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-five A.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. Ye gods.
“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—”
“Doing what?”
“—Elena and I will work on inventory and then have a meeting with the chairman.” Sofia, he had been told on the drive over, had spent the night at Teresa’s shelter and was keeping an eye on the kids, as she often did. She was the youngest of Delaney’s little group, and Rake had assumed her days on the street weren’t as far behind her as the others’ were. Teresa’s third in command had also been plucked from the streets, and helped run the place. If he’d known baby-sitting might have let him sleep in, he would have—no. Not if it meant doing charity without Delaney. And Lillith assured him between slurps of cocoa that she’d help him do whatever it was. “Okay?”
“’Kay. Thanks for letting me finish charging my phone. When we get back tonight, I’ll try to reach out to Blake again.”
“Great!”
“That sounded suspiciously cheerful. So eager to get rid of me?” he teased. Please don’t say yes.
“No. I sort of can’t wait to see what Blake sends you next,” she admitted with a guilty smile.
“That makes one of us.” Rake drank more coffee and groaned. “He’d better be sane this time, that’s all I have to say about it. Um, Teresa, not to look a gift barista in the mouth, but why are there five tablespoons of sugar in my cappuccino?”
“Whoa,” from Lillith, who now had a tiny chocolate mustache, which was so friggin’ adorable, he wasn’t going to tell her.
“Aw, man.” Delaney shook her head.
Elena turned around to scold Teresa, finishing with “You will succumb to diabetes!” which, for some reason, Teresa found hilarious.
“Sono fiducioso di morte violenta sarà la mia fine. Diabete? Ha!”
Rake said nothing; he had noticed that Europeans tended to (rightly) assume most tourists weren’t fluent. Even though the other women knew he could speak Italian, they kept forgetting. And so he didn’t comment when Teresa explained that she knew she’d die a violent death, something sudden, violent, and unrelated to diabetes. Given how the others (except Delaney, who was bent over her laptop, and Lillith, who didn’t comment) agreed, he assumed they all shared the same outlook.