Page 37 of Targeted By Fate
Whoa! My eyes filled with tears, but I blinked them away.
“Life is shit sometimes, but we take precautions and do the best we can.” Keane patted the bed, and I sat beside him.
“But that’s not good enough. We have bodyguards, cameras, and guns.”
“No.” He shook his head. “That’s not the life I want to live. I accept your lifestyle, but I can’t live in a prison.”
“Bodyguards?”
“Maybe, but not all the time. If I’m out with friends at night.”
“At night?” I flipped back onto a pillow. My heart sped up, and my shallow breathing punctuated the silence in the room.
“It’s called having a life, Boaz.”
The pack and family had been my life, but now it was expanding. I’d have to learn new skills.
“Okay, I’m cool with that.” I’d have to be.
Keane kissed my cheek. “It must be hard letting go, but you’re opening yourself up to possibilities.”
I attempted a smile.
“You’ll get used to it. It’s like a roller coaster.”
I hated rides, they made me sick to my stomach, but I’d try.
“Now about you and the baker.”
“What?” I pulled the covers over my head. “Never met the man.”
18
KEANE
After a couple days of nonstop rain, I was so ready to get out of the house and get some fresh air. One of the downsides of working from home was that there was noreasonto go places most days. And with all the bad weather, I didn’t.
And now that I didn’t have bodyguards following me everywhere, there was a sense of freedom. My mate had meant well. He hadn’t been trying to be a dick. He loved me, had seen me harmed not once, but twice, and he wanted me safe. I could hardly be mad at him for that.
After a small breakfast of six eggs and oatmeal, I wrote Boaz a note letting him know where I was heading. Eating while pregnant was such a weird thing. There were times when I didn’t even want to think about food, others when I wanted everything I could get my hands on, others where I had a craving that was non-negotiable, and those like today when a half-dozen eggs served with a bowl of steamy oats sounded like the absolute perfect combination.
After getting dressed, I set out for the day. I didn’t have much planned—I was still in the exhaustion stage of pregnancy—but I needed to get out of the house, get some fresh air. And also, we needed tuna. Fine, it was me. I needed tuna.
As cliché as it was, tuna was exactly what my baby was craving. Tuna, tuna, and more tuna. How very feline of me. The human pregnancy food lists all stated to limit tuna while you were pregnant. The human list could suck it, because my cat couldn’t get enough of the stuff.
But my first stop was going to be the public library. There was a time I used to buy all my books. Back when I had a good job, that was. Now I borrowed them, and it worked out great.
I suspected that if I let my mate know I was wanting to start building on my collection, he’d make sure that happened. He was good like that—always looking out for me, always trying to give me what I needed. And now that I was pregnant, it was almost a flaw, because he was so doting I had to be careful. I couldn’t even hint at a craving without it showing up on my plate or in my bowl. I could only imagine the book situation if I asked for a trip to the bookstore.
I took a ride share to the library and went inside. Today was the first day of a two-day painting class I’d been eyeing. I was hardly an artist, but I loved to try new things. The teacher helped us blend our colors and get the base of our painting done. They used big, fancy words, but basically, we did what I called underpainting. We covered the canvas with the background, and we’d be putting our main item on later.
Mine was a truck that I took from their inspiration board, but others had houses or cabins—which I supposed were houses too, but they were in a different section of the board, and a few had animals. Animals seemed far outside my realm of painting skills, so I avoided all of those. A truck I could probably handle. Maybe. I’d find out next week.
After class was finished and my painting was on the drying rack, I headed to the new releases and found a mystery that looked pretty fun. There was someone who could talk to ghosts trying to solve a ghost’s murder, but somehow the ghost didn’t remember how they got killed. The plot was a little sus, but it sounded like fun, so I checked it out and put it in my bag and waited at the front door for the ride share.
I knew Boaz preferred that I had bodyguards with me. He was showing me his confidence and trust in me by letting me go alone and without all the tech tracking me. I didn’t want to break that trust, but also… I wasn’t quite ready to welcome bodyguards back into my life with open arms.
Ride shares felt like a good compromise to me. Driving myself meant that people might recognize my car, the one Boaz insisted on buying. Ride shares were sort of chaotic in their methodology. Up until you ordered your car, you didn’t know what kind of car was coming or when they'd be there. Everything was fairly random, which in my mind made them a lot safer than, let’s say, the bus where there were set times.
