“Hey, one of my guys makes deviled eggs and eats them when he can’t sleep. We’re all a bit weird.” Nolan headed to the kitchen. “Coffee maker or single cup?”
“I’ll do it. It’s not your job to wait on me.” He brushed past Nolan, who stepped back.
The way Nolan had moved into Fynn’s life made him twitchy. He’d enjoyed sharing take-out for dinner, delivered to the lab by an employee of Nolan’s when Fynn had worked past seven. Riding with Nolan in the back of the new Lexus behind Joe and being walked up to his apartment had let Fynn fantasize in a pleasant but not-meant-to-be-real way. Then Nolan had said the building’s security was crap, and he’d camp out overnight until they got some cameras in place and worked out a duty rotation.
Nolan ended up chilling on the couch, ignoring Fynn’s insistence that he’d been fine in his apartment for years and this was overkill.
Which it is. Right?Fynn set up a mug and cone filter for a single cup. “You want coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“You’re here to protect me, but you don’t need to stay alert?” He clicked the kettle on. Maybe that was snarky, but his heart still raced under his thin robe.
“There’s degrees of alertness, and too much caffeine doesn’t help. I have an alarm on the knob of your door and laser sensors set across your accessible windows. I’d have advance notice.”
“Those wouldn’t be enough without you hanging around?”
“What would you do if they went off?” Nolan leaned against the counter, arms crossed over his frankly ridiculous chest.
Scream? Call 911?Fynn settled for pouring his water through the coffee in a very dignified way. His whole body shivered in awareness of the big bulk of Nolan standing there.
He’d never brought a man back to this apartment. Fumbling attempts at sex in college had taught him he wanted a retreat option as soon as the cum started cooling. If he had sex, he went to the other guy’s apartment. Not that he’d done anything in years.
Bringing a guy here was too risky. What if he didn’t want to leave? Nolan was bigger and yummier than any man Fynn had ever been with, but harder to shift too. Fynn was five-eleven, but Nolan would dwarf anyone who walked up to him. Although… “Maybe not Shaquille O’Neal.”
“Um. Is that an answer to who you’re gonna call in an emergency? I grant you, he’d be easy to hide behind.”
“So would you,” Fynn said, to pretend he hadn’t just come out with something inane.By coming out with something even more inane.
Except Nolan grinned. “Yep, and that’s what I’d want you to do if an alarm sounded. Duck down, hide behind me, and let me deal with it.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.” The prospect wasn’t settling Fynn’s nerves. He added more water to the cone.
“Of course it is,” Nolan said. “I’d be doing what I trained for and am paid a bunch of money for. You’d be making my job easier by staying out of the way.”
Put like that, maybe hiding wasn’t cowardly. “How much money?”
He wondered if Nolan would say none of his business, since Micah’d arranged everything, but Nolan answered calmly, “We’re contracted for sixty thousand for the first month, for a single-guard twenty-four hour rotating detail. After a month, we’ll see what your ongoing needs are.”
Fynn had so lost track of what money meant since the launching of RipeBox that he couldn’t decide if that was expensive or not.Do the math.Probably, it would take four or five people to have someone around him twenty-four seven, which meant something like twelve thousand per person a month, before expenses, less than he’d made as a premier-level research chemist at ZomaChem, before he’d had his breakout idea. “And I wasn’t even being shot at.”
“We don’t get shot at often. Very rarely, in fact.”
“But it has happened to you?”
“Once. A pissed-off ex-husband who was drunk as a skunk. Couldn’t have hit a barn, most likely, even if Sheridan hadn’t tackled him.”
“I’m glad. That Sheridan tackled him, I mean.” Fynn picked up his coffee and sipped it, trying not to burn his tongue.Ah, the elixir of life. Come to Daddy.Although calling himself Daddy with Nolan in the room was pathetic. Not that he wanted to call Nolan Daddy either. He’d never been into that scene.But if I was, it’d be with him.The soothing buzz of caffeine let him not say the words out loud.
Nolan straightened up and wandered the small apartment as Fynn drank his coffee. He didn’t touch anything, but Fynn had the impression he was cataloging and would remember. He stopped at the glass shelving in the living room. “The Millennium Falcon. Is that LEGO?”
“Yeah. I like it.” He could dive into a project and lose himself in the precise placement of tile on tile, blocking out the rest of the world. It was restful.
“I enjoyed that when I was a kid but haven’t touched it in years.” Before Fynn could wonder if that meant Nolan thought LEGO was childish, he went on, “One guy I work with builds ships in a bottle for fun. Or he says it’s fun. If one doesn’t work properly, you can hear him swearing a block away.”
“How many—” Fynn swallowed the word “guys” because that was sexist, right? “—folks, um, people do you have?”
“Five plus me, right now. I recently divested a crew to a client who wanted longterm security and liked my people. We’re small right now, sized for single target protection.”
