Taking Control (Kerr Chronicles #2)(51)
Author: Jen Frederick

“Would you let me leave you behind?”

“No.”

“Then it’s futile for me to insist on going alone. So you knew about Steve?”

“Yes, and you knew I was following Howe around?”

I nod. “Steve wasn’t spying, but he did ask me if I knew you were watching Howe eat lunch several times a week.”

She grimaces. “And you didn’t say anything?”

Taking another swallow of the beer, I raise an eyebrow. “I was waiting for you.”

“I guess we should start sharing things with each other.” She studies her hands.

The room seems slightly chilled, and after a day like I’ve had, the last thing I want to do is fight. “We’re both used to be carrying our own burdens. This is a process.” I pull her toward me for a quick kiss. “We’re learning we can lean on someone else. That’s new and it will take time.”

She gives me a grateful smile and rises. From the kitchen she says, “Jake says I’m really good at this and that I’m wasted behind the desk.”

“He does, does he?” I follow her. She’s rummaging around the refrigerator looking for ingredients. Apparently she’s excited enough to cook. I wait for direction on what to chop. “What exactly does he think you’re good at?”

“Investigative work. He says I’m good at seeing puzzle pieces and putting together a bigger picture.” She hands me an onion and two tomatoes and a few cloves of garlic. She dumps butter to melt in the pan while she starts dredging pieces of beef in flour. I start prepping.

“I’ve always felt you were quick.”

“Jake says I could do field work and more,” she babbles on as if I hadn’t spoken. “If, you know, my reading skills were better. I couldn’t do any of the searches, like using the marital records database or looking up the criminal blotter.”

I stay silent, and not just because I am tired of hearing “Jake says” come out of her mouth; I can sense that this is important. I consider and discard a dozen different responses before settling on one. “What do you want to do?”

“I think I’d like to try again. You’d have to hire me a tutor. One that specializes in helping dyslexics read,” she says quietly. Her head is down, and I can’t see her expression, but I think I hear something in her voice that sounds like hope.

I nod, painfully aware of how close to the surface my own emotions are. She’s asked me for almost nothing. Clearing my throat, I say, “The best. I’ll hire the very best. No matter where they are in the world. They’ll come here and teach you what you need to know.”

“Thank you,” she says quietly. There’s a sheen in her eyes, but I know that hugging her will look too close to pity. I simply give her a small kiss on her forehead and return to my sous chef tasks. Beside me I hear her sigh in pleasure.

“I don’t know why I’m so emotional lately,” she admits, firing up the pan.

“Maybe you are pregnant.” I’m only half joking. I’d love it if she were pregnant.

She sucks in a breath and pats her belly. “I-I don’t think so, but we haven’t been careful.”

“That’s a bit of an understatement. I’ll call around tomorrow for a recommendation for an OB.” I pick up her hand, messy from the food, and kiss the ring. Her face glows with pleasure, and I want to shove everything aside and take her right there.

Instead, I pick up the onion and start chopping. Soon the pungent smell is serving its cock-deflating purpose.

The beef dish is a simple but tasty one, and after we’ve squeezed the last bit of lime into the sauce pan to join the butter basted meat, fresh tomatoes, and vegetables, dinner is ready to be plated. The wine that didn’t make it into the sauce is poured into glasses.

“You seem to be getting the hang of the cooking thing,” I say as I fork the tasty food into my mouth.

She shrugs. “I like cooking here. Plus, having Steve drive me around makes it easy. He parks illegally, and I run in to get groceries. I’m out before he can get a ticket. It’s a perfect set-up. I would have invited him in, but he said he had to get home and have dinner with his girlfriend.”

I give her a disbelieving look. Steve is the opposite of loquacious. A mute person is more talkative than him. She sticks out her lower lip, just a tiny bit, and frowns. “Fine, he didn’t say anything, but I’m learning his grunts and facial expressions.”

“Steve always looks constipated to me whenever I bring up his girlfriend.”

“See,” she points out, “you know his body language too.”

Later when we are drying dishes, I ask her to expound on her learning disability. “Can you tell me something about your dyslexia so that I have a better idea of what kind of tutor we’ll need?”

“Around the third grade, I was doing poorly in writing and reading—lagging behind. I had a good memory, and we were often placed together in groups. I’d just ask one of my partners to read part of the book out loud. I’d remember enough to get by but struggled, particularly with spelling. Like, I heard a word or a sound but couldn’t apply it to paper. Finally, they put me through a bunch of tests and out popped the dyslexia diagnosis. So I can read, but just not well, and it takes me a long time to get through anything more than a couple sentences long.”

I remember her struggle over reading my mother’s last letter and feel guilty for asking her to make the attempt. She reads my thoughts with ease. “Stop. Please. I liked that you asked me. That the issue of my poor reading never comes up because it isn’t important to you.”

“It isn’t.” I draw her down onto the sofa next to me and pull her legs over my lap. “It’s the least important fact I know about you. You’re smart, loyal, and brave. You like to call yourself pragmatic, but you’re far more optimistic about everything than I am. I’d rather wake up next to you every morning than anyone else, reader or not.”

“I wish I could read though.” She rubs her cheek against the cloth of my T-shirt, and my heart begins to pump just a tad bit faster. Proximity to Tiny—oh hell, just thinking about her—accelerates my heart rate. She makes me feel alive, and that’s worth more money than the world holds. “When you hired that volunteer to read to Mom in the hospital during the chemo days, I was jealous because I couldn’t do that.”