Chapter Twenty-One
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Amana opened her eyes to the sun low in the sky, cracking through a light layer of clouds and filtered through the dirty windows.
She stretched, her body only giving a small grumble over the movement. She’d taken Merc’s advice on both the stretching and the soak, where she added Epsom salts she found under the sink.
Only the proffered massage never materialized. The phone call stopped short whatever possibility had been building up after their talk in the car, where his honesty broke her heart and lifted it all at once. Stopped it, but didn’t break it, because his manner was still changed, still filled with tentative steps towards something more.
She wanted and feared this change in equal parts. The more she saw of the Merc from her dreams in reality, the harder it was to keep Nakoa at the front of her mind.
So she stepped back as well, and went to sleep after her bath and some food. Overall, her body seemed happy to have gotten some movement yesterday and wasn’t giving her too much grief.
Tiredness still lurked, but it wasn’t the leaden exhaustion that promised she’d be falling asleep every five minutes, and it was more rested than she felt since this began. Merc let her sleep more than usual.
Speaking of…
Climbing out of the king-sized bed, she leaned over the railing to look down into the sitting area. Merc had a cup of coffee at his side and was working on something on his tablet. He said he was going to lay down while she did, but…“Did you sleep at all?”
His head shot up, those hazel eyes finding her fast. Judging by the dark circles she’d guess no, he hadn’t slept, but the fact those dark circles didn’t detract from his attractiveness was what kept buzzing in her head, an annoying little bee that wouldn’t go away no matter how much she swatted at it.
“Some,” he said, and didn’t elaborate.
If he wasn’t lying, she’d shave her head, and since all she did with her hair was pull it up in a top-knot, well, there was that. “You know, if you don’t sleep a kindergartener will be able to sneak up on you.”
“I’ve seen some kindergarteners in training. You’d be a fool to underestimate them.”
There was no humor – dry or otherwise – in his tone. “How old were you when you started…doing what you do?”
Without looking up from the tablet he was once again engrossed with, Merc said, “Shouldn’t this line of questioning be done over liquor? You should also back away from the railing. I’m afraid you’re going to fall over.”
Heat scorched across her face and past her ears. She backed away from the railing and hurried into the bathroom, doing the usual morning routine.
As she came downstairs, the embarrassment settled, and he hadn’t told her he wasn’t going to answer her questions. She curled up on the overstuffed chair, situated diagonal from where he was sitting. “So, how long?”
A moment’s pause, then his fingers worked over the screen, moving some line of code this way or that. “My whole life.”
“Like when you were in kindergarten-?”
“My whole life.”
His voice was flat, a smooth wall without a fingerhold she could gain purchase against. She was falling, unable to ascertain which path was the right one, which direction would give her insight into this fascinating man, and which would leave him to eviscerate her emotionally, break the fragile peace they were living under and declare her once more his enemy.
But even as some part of her tried to pull her away, begged her to stop before she committed forever, she leaned forward in the seat to ask her next question. “Did your parents train you? Were they mercenaries as well?”
His finger paused on the tablet, but while she saw hesitance, there was nothing to indicate she crossed a line in asking the question. This was more in the area of straightforward debate which she’d been seeing from him lately, the internal back-and-forth over how much he was going to share with her.
After long moments, he looked up from underneath those long lashes, his bangs giving him a shadowy, slippery feel even in the morning light. “What are you willing to offer for answers?”
That pulled her up, and it was after she jerked back that she saw how far forward she had been leaning, waiting for his answer. “What?”
“I’m a mercenary. You can’t expect me to give away something for nothing. What’s the quid pro quo to be?”
“I don’t-”
“You have no money,” he interrupted, and now he was leaning forward, those eyes intense, that honey color heating to an unnerving degree. “So that leaves your body, or a standard back-and-forth, a question for a question and an answer for an answer. Are you offering either of those?”