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He flashed her a grin. “Sticks. A bit of moss. The usual things. Have faith, ye of little. I’ve been laying fires since I was five.”
-chapter nine-
Jodi Castle
Paul rapidly dispelled her scepticism over his claim. He’d lit a fire with two sticks in the time it’d have taken her to do it with a box of matches and forty firelighters, leading her to wonder if he wasn’t some sort of visitation rather than an actual human. She’d encountered no one like him before. Someone so full of love and life, with such an expansive sense of adventure. Now, admittedly, she didn’t usually hang out with rock stars, or even ordinary sorts of musicians, so maybe they were all a little cracked and zany, but she suspected not. It seemed more likely that was just him—Paul “Rock Giant” Reed. A resourceful cinnamon roll disguised as an axe murderer; a hot, ripped, non-bearded axe murderer.
He began adding twigs to his tepee of flames from the woodpile he’d constructed while she’d been off sourcing a kitty basket—they were making do with a former water barrel turned flowerpot, lined with vegetation so it looked like the nest of a very strange bird—then he constructed a log cabin around it, before finally sitting back alongside her so that their shoulders were touching. They’d left the door to the glass dome open a crack to let the smoke escape, but it was warming up nicely. She still wished she’d brought the duvet along with her but was biting her tongue so as not to say that, because he’d probably offer to go back and get it.
“Cuppa?”
“Huh?”
He tugged the small backpack he’d brought along over so that it sat between his knees, and produced a cup, a litre bottle of water, and a teabag. “Got some milk powder in here somewhere too. Oh! We could give that to the kits.”
“Do you have a kettle in there too?”
“It’s a metal mug.” He set it on a brick and pushed it into the blaze.
“It’ll be too hot to hold.”
Out came a pair of insulated gloves.
“Something to eat?”
Crackers and a tube of something that turned out to be vegan mushroom pâté.
“Entertainment?”
His eyebrows quirked, and he sucked his teeth, then slapped a strip of condoms into her lap. “Failing that, I can give you all the greatest hits of the ages on these beauties.” Two teaspoons.
Jodi lifted the condoms, straining not to grin, although the teaspoons also intrigued her. “That’s a lot of entertaining.”
He shrugged. “They’re useful for all sorts of things. You can never have too many. Ask me how I know.”
“How do you—”
“Know? I’ve spent too many nights sat around campfires, and definitely too many with Xane. Man has a one-track mind, whereas I’m more than capable of holding more than a dozen thoughts at once.”
“He’s your lead singer, right?”
“That’s the fool.” He pulled the cup from the fire, and tested the water, then poured some off into the lid of the mug and mixed in some milk powder before giving it to the kittens. “It’s not ideal, but hopefully it’ll keep them going for a while until we can get them something better.”
“I’m sure they’re grateful,” she said, growing all doe eyed again.
He pushed the mug back onto the fire with some more water.
“What will you tell them—your band?”
He dismissed the remark with a grunt. “Job for when the sun comes up. Sure I’ll think of something to say.”
“It’s not the first time you’ve gone missing, is it?” It was a gut feeling she got about him. Nothing about this evening had fazed him. He, unlike her, was completely comfortable with the madness.
He settled on his back, with his head resting on his backpack. “It’s the first time I’ve been kidnapped. I have to say, I always imagined it’d involve more restraints and less appealing company. I kinda envisaged it being more static too, you know, due to the restraints.”
“You know it’s not actually normal to speculate about being kidnapped, right?” Her hand found his head, and she began to comb through the spikes of his hair. It was silky soft. There was length on top, but the sides were undercut.
“Depends on the circles you inhabit. There’re people who are really into it, and pay other people to do it. Truth.” He turned onto his side and moved his head to her lap. “I had a mate, and that was his official gig, paid taxes, company pension, the lot. People paid him to do it, and I don’t mean dodgy people. I mean, like the people he actually kidnapped. He’d worked as a roadie for years before moving into it. Said it was better paid and less heavy lifting. Not as much roving about either.”
