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Which should be the last thing I was thinking about right now.
“A vow of celibacy, huh?”
“What can I say? You’re not my type.”
He smirked. The cocky bastard. “Go get dressed. We’re not walking out the door with you in only a T-shirt.”
“Such a gentleman.” I backed away from him, careful not to step on any glass, and ran upstairs to throw on some sweats and slip on my tennis shoes. I pulled my coat on because it was freezing outside and came down the steps to find Romeo duct-taping black trash bags over the shattered door. All the glass had been swept into a pile in the corner.
He looked up, eyes perusing me from head to toe, just like he’d done earlier. For a man who claimed he wasn’t interested, he sure didn’t look at me like I was the last woman on Earth that he was attracted to.
But that didn’t matter at the moment.
He’d agreed to keep my secret, and he’d offered me a place to stay.
“Can you lock your apartment so that if anyone gets in here, they can’t break into your place?”
“Yeah. It’s double bolted.”
“Do you have any money in the register or in a safe?”
“No. He took everything from the register, and I did a bank run earlier today, so there’s nothing here.” There was that lump again. I’d have to go to the bank first thing in the morning and pull out some cash to have in the register tomorrow. On top of the cost of the door, it was going to be a bad hit.
We’d just opened, so I’d invested a lot into the kitchen appliances and stocking up on supplies. Money was lean at the moment.
Obviously, I had a safety net. My family would always help me.
But I was not going to tell them that I’d been robbed. My father would know immediately that it was Slade.
I now felt pretty confident about what had happened with my brother and my parents. If Slade had behaved that night at the house the way he had here tonight, I understood why they were cautious.
Fearful, even.
So, I clearly couldn’t tell them what happened, or I’d never repair my family.
A teenager throwing a rock through the window was an easier sell.
“Before you freak out, I called my buddy, Brett Rogers.” He held his hands up to stop me from losing my shit, because Brett Rogers was a cop. “Relax. He’s a friend. It will look more suspicious that you didn’t call the cops when it happened. I told him that I was walking home right as the alarm had gone off, so that way, he can write it up, and there won’t be any questions tomorrow. He’ll be here in five minutes, and then you can deal with the door in the morning.”
“Good thinking. Of course, I’d call if the door got smashed by teenagers. Thank you.”
Brett Rogers arrived and wrote up a quick police report. Romeo surprised me when he told him that he’d come out of the gym just as a couple of teenagers ran off, laughing down the alley.
The officer didn’t question anything about our stories, and he told me it wasn’t safe to stay here tonight. I’d made it clear that I would not be staying here, but thankfully, he didn’t question where I was going.
I’d come back in the morning to deal with this mess.
We said goodnight after he ran caution tape all over the front door and said he’d have a car parked out front so we wouldn’t risk anyone else vandalizing the place tonight.
“Ready?” Romeo said, and his hand found the small of my back while we stepped out the back door. I bolted all three locks, which made him laugh, considering the front door was covered with a plastic bag.
“Thanks for that,” I said, keeping my voice low. “And for letting me stay at your place.”
“What am I going to do? Let you sleep in the alley? I’m not a complete dick.”
“Is that your story?” I said, my voice all tease.
We walked a few paces across the alley to his house, which sat right behind the gym. He pushed the door open, and I took inthe space. It was small but very cool. The ceilings were vaulted, with raw wood beams forming a peak at the top. Cement floors ran throughout the studio space. There was a modern kitchen in the center, with a couch on one side and a bed on the other. It reminded me of a loft that a friend of mine had in the city.
