Not wanting to freak her out, Atlas decided that catching her eye was the best idea, instead of standing there like a creeper.
He wheeled his hands in the air, a big smile on his face. She turned, doing an epic double take.
All thoughts of smiles and name-telling dissolved into thin air for Atlas when she slammed her hands over her mouth and screamed bloody murder. She sprang away from him, tripping backward over the still-running vacuum and all the way over to the far wall. She slammed her back against the wall and flattened herself there, her chest heaving in and out and her eyes wide.
Atlas kicked the vacuum plug out of the outlet and the ensuing silence was heavier than the incessant noise had been.
“Jeez. I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I really thought that catching your eye would be better than calling out to you.”
She said nothing. Just continued to breathe like she’d just run a marathon. This was not a normal reaction. Sure, there were plenty of people who scared easily, were naturally jumpy. But Atlas was a bodyguard by trade. He recognized all the signs. This woman was terrified of something. Truly terrified.
“Can we start over?” he requested, holding his hands up in front of himself, and then, remembering the way she’d hungrily watched his Mexican food the other day, he reached down and picked up the discarded bag of Thai food. He held it up. He didn’t lie this time about why he happened to have an entire extra serving of food. “Pad Thai or drunken noodles. Your choice.”
She still didn’t say anything, but when he took a few steps toward the kitchen, her head turned to follow the path of the food.
That’s when he got a good look at her face.
***
Rebecca saw the very second that Atlas realized half of her face looked like she’d gone ten rounds with the champ. His expression went the entire range of shock to horror to anger. It landed on something like deep concern.
She’d have preferred the horror.
He opened his mouth to speak and Rebecca steeled herself for whatever he was going to say. She should have come up with a lie already. She should have some story in her back pocket that could explain away the bruising. Why hadn’t she thought to do that? Oh yeah. Probably because she hadn’t expected to see this guy in the middle of the workday?
Her eyes flicked up to his across the room. One hand came to his hip and the other to the back of his head. His face twisted up.
“Does that hurt as bad as it looks?”
Rebecca had been prepared for any number of questions. Like, What the hell happened to you? Or who did this to you?
But those were intrusive, possessive question that she would have shrugged off as fast as possible.
But this question? The first one that had tripped its way off this giant man’s tongue, had been a sympathetic question. A kind one. It had had nothing to do with anyone else in the equation of her bruises but Rebecca. He wasn’t focused on the world that made Rebecca hurt. He was focused on her and her alone.
It was the only possible question that could have gotten a response out of her. “Yes,” she answered honestly.
He hissed air through his teeth. “Stay. Stay there,” he said, backing away from her. “No. On second thought, why don’t you take a seat? Just give me two secs.”
He was back less than a minute later with a bag of frozen blueberries in one hand and a bottle of ibuprofen in the other. He carried a water bottle under his arm that he handed over to her as well.
Rebecca blinked at the frozen fruit before she held it back to him. “These are too expensive to use as ice.”
He looked like he might argue but then he clapped his mouth closed and came back a moment later with a Ziploc bag filled with ice.
This, Rebecca accepted from him. She also accepted the moment for what it was. Her face was throbbing, and so were her ribs. The resident had come back to his apartment early, he seemed intent on talking with her, and she needed a break before she got back to work anyways.
So, she perched on one of the armchairs, took two ibuprofen and held the ice to her midsection.
Atlas strode to the other side of the room and sat on the furthest couch from her. His expression tightened when he saw where she’d chosen to put the ice. His face crumpled down into sympathy. “Your ribs?”
She nodded and prayed for the ibuprofen to work fast.
“So…” He let out a long breath. “Take a load off for a minute.” And with that, he reached out, selected one of the thirty billion remotes sitting in front of him and turned on a television show. Actually, it was the middle of a movie about high schoolers and some sort of bet and all the ensuing hijinks.
Rebecca vaguely watched it while she iced her ribs and then, after a while, her cheekbone. But her gaze flicked back and forth between the TV screen and Atlas himself. He sat leaned back on the couch, his cheek balanced on one fist and one leg crossed over the other. His humongous foot bounced, as if it had a mind of its own.
After a bit, the credits rolled, Rebecca’s water was finished, and she figured they’d reached the natural conclusion to this strangely calming interlude.
She stood up and Atlas immediately shut off the TV.
“I don’t want you to keep working,” he blurted out.
There wasn’t really a whole lot to say to that, so Rebecca just blinked at him. Then something horrifying occurred to her. “You’re firing me?”
“No! Jeez. Heck no. Pretty sure you’re the best in the biz. No. I just—Look, you’re hurt. You’ve already pretty much done everything around my place. Let’s just leave the rest for when you’re feeling better.”
She was instantly suspicious of this kind of kindness. She wished that she weren’t, but life had taught her the hard way that nothing was free.
Maybe he’d give her the rest of the afternoon off. But pretty soon, he’d start thinking how grand it would be to have a cleaning person who didn’t show up with bruises and needing the afternoon off. And not much longer after that, in his mind, it would start to seem like she’d been the one who’d suggested the afternoon off. And it would only take a single phone call to get her kicked off this job. And from there it was a hop and a skip to being jobless. And homeless.
She knew all about slippery slopes. She avoided them at all costs. “That’s all right, sir. I’m better now. I’ll just finish up quickly.”
“At least eat first. Please, just sit and eat.”
Rebecca had been tortured by the scent of the Thai food for the last twenty minutes. She didn’t have the strength to say an outright no, the way she knew she should. But she didn’t say yes either.
Atlas took her silence and ran with it. He was up in a shot, faster than a man his size should be able to move.
He dragged two TV trays out of a closet and set one up in front of Rebecca and one over where he’d been sitting across the room. He came back with silverware in one hand and two cups of orange juice in the other hand. Rebecca marveled at the thought of having hands big enough to be able to carry two cups at once without blinking.
He set her cup and silverware down on the TV tray in front of her, did the same for his tray and then strode to the other side of the room where the food still sat.
“It’s still warm enough for me. But do you want me to microwave yours?”
She shook her head. It could be frozen into a block of ice and she’d still eat it.
“Cool. Pad Thai or drunken noodles?”
Rebecca paused for a long minute. “I’m not sure. I’ve never had either.”
Where other people might have expressed shock or sympathy at her never having eaten Thai food before, Atlas just grinned. “Oh, you’re in for a treat, my friend.”
He flipped open both styrofoam containers and held them out to her.
“Here,” he told her. “Take a bite of each and you can decide which one you want.”
She took a bite of the one with flat, brown noodles first, covering her mouth the second the food touched her tongue
. Her eyes fell to the floor, and she tried, very hard, to cover her reaction. But dang. That was tasty.
She swallowed and looked up to see that Atlas’s smile was still burning full force. He shook the container of Pad Thai at her to urge her to try that one as well. She eyed it a bit more dubiously than the first because there were peanuts on the noodles, and wedges of lime tucked around the edges of the dish. It was a flavor combination that had never occurred to her before and she wasn’t sure it would be a good one. But she took the bite anyways, trying to ignore Atlas’s blatant, tail-wagging attention to her first experiences with Thai food.
But dang! She liked this one too! The dishes were such different flavors but they tasted so good!
“Can’t choose,” she finally said to him.
“Halfsies it is, Kathleen,” he replied without missing a beat. He used her fork to give her half the drunken noodles and to take half of the Pad Thai for himself. And then he strode back across the room and to his own tray.
He looked up to see if he’d guessed right on her name, but she wrinkled her nose as a no and he just chuckled.
She could feel his eyes on her and, as hungry as she was, she was finding it difficult to eat under such a bright spotlight. She held her hand over her mouth as she chewed, her eyes cast down.
They ate in silence for maybe thirty seconds before Atlas held up the remote control again. “You mind?”
She shook her head no, and watched as he channel surfed. This time, he didn’t choose one show or another. He just put it on one program and then switched to another the second a commercial came on. It was utterly maddening. But Rebecca did not object. Who cared? She was currently eating the best food she’d ever eaten. And with his attention elsewhere, she could tuck into her food with abandon.
She resisted the urge to lick her plate clean, but she would have done it if he hadn’t been sitting there.
Pretty much the second she was putting her fork down, he was turning the television off. He set his tray aside, one of his knees jouncing.
“If you were in danger, is there any chance that you’d tell me?” he asked her.
Again, it was such an unexpected question. Rebecca had absolutely no idea how to answer it. “I should get back to work.”
That much was true. She’d wasted an hour sitting here with this man, icing her bruises and eating fancy food. The afternoon was slipping into the early evening and it wouldn’t be long before she had to get back to the shelter before it closed its intake doors for the night.
“All right. Okay.” Atlas tipped his head down and scratched at his beard as he stared at the floor. He seemed to be talking to himself more than to her. “Then there’s probably not any point in asking what happened or who did it. In that case—”
Rebecca sprang to her feet and started clearing her food. She had to finish cleaning his house and then she had to get the hell out of here. This man was inserting himself into her life in a way that she really couldn’t afford. Men who did favors always expected payment. Rebecca had been forced to pay one too many times in her life. Never again. Nope.
And what was worse, his sweet kindness was making her soften toward him in a way that she really, really couldn’t afford. It was sad and backwards, but Rebecca trusted the slimy, hardened, cruel men of her past more than she trusted this soft, sweet man in front of her. At least from the outright bad ones she knew exactly what to expect.
She was dimly aware of him holding up his hands across the room. She turned, trying to keep him in her line of vision. But to her surprise, he hadn’t risen from the sofa. He was waving his hands through the air, trying to get her attention and obviously wanting her to stay in the room so that he could talk to her, but he wasn’t rising up, he wasn’t getting in her way, he wasn’t taking her by the shoulders and shoving her back down onto the sofa. He was just sitting in one place, waving his hands like an air traffic controller.
She stopped still and turned all the way toward him. She cocked her head to one side and just stared. Who the hell was this man and what the hell did he want from her?
“Okay,” he said, his hands going flat in the air, palms out. “You don’t have to tell me what happened. You don’t have to tell me your name. You don’t even have to speak. But please. Nod yes if you’re about to go back to the same place where you got knocked around. Please don’t lie.”
There was something so heartbreaking about those words. Please don’t lie. She felt like they were two kids on a schoolyard making pinky promises with one another. And maybe that’s what made her give in. What opened her door, just the tiniest bit. The fact that there was something childlike about this man. He wasn’t shoving her around, he wasn’t hitting on her, he wasn’t ogling her. He was sitting on a couch across the room from her, giving her all the space in the world, and he was saying please.
She gave in. And curtly nodded.
Yes. She was headed back to the shelter where she’d gotten the shit kicked out of her last night for no real reason at all. Other than the fact that she’d been there. And the women who’d done it hadn’t liked the look of her. Or they’d wanted her cot. Or perhaps, they’d wanted something else of hers that was harder to name. They’d wanted her dignity. Or her pride. Or some nugget of her humanity that Rebecca was deeply grateful she hadn’t rescinded. But how much longer she could hold onto it, she wasn’t certain.
It wasn’t the first time she’d been beaten up. But it was certainly the first time she’d truly had nowhere else to go.
Across the room, his knee started kicking up and down. He chewed the inside of his cheek as he studied her.
There was an intensity in his eyes that was utterly foreign to Rebecca, but when he spoke, his voice was light, friendly even.
“How about this. How about I go across the hall and stay at my brother’s house tonight. And you just go ahead and sleep in my guest bedroom.”
***
Atlas had no earthly clue how his idea was going over. Because apparently his cleaning woman had turned to stone. She stood there, not breathing, not blinking. He fought the urge to repeat himself. Obviously he was gonna need to sell her on this idea.
Unsure of what her objections actually were, he decided to hit every angle. “I’ll just quick pack up my toothbrush and head over there. I’ll get out of your hair. I spend most evenings over there anyways, they won’t care if I crash out. I don’t even have to tell them that you’re here, if you’d rather.” He was just guessing here, but she seemed like someone who’d prefer to fly under the radar. “If you’re worried about me intruding on your space, I won’t. There’s a lock on the guest room door. And there’s a deadbolt on the front door. You can throw that the second I leave and then you’ll know for sure that I can’t come back in.”
Her face cracked a little bit, the first indication that she hadn’t been frozen in time over there, but Atlas couldn’t interpret the expression for the life of him. He had no idea if he was helping his case or hurting it.
“You can eat anything from the fridge. Or not, whatever you want. There’s extra toothbrushes and you know all about the guest linens situation. So, obviously the bed is clean for you… What else, what else? Oh! You can shower, wash your clothes, watch TV. I can leave my laptop so you can use the internet if you need. Anything. Please. Just stay here. Just don’t go tonight. If you—”
He cut off the second she lifted one palm into the air. A silent request for silence. Atlas was used to people asking him to stop talking, but he didn’t usually listen. This time though? He cut off immediately. He could practically see her thoughts racing, like river water through a series of rapids.
“Why?” she eventually asked, every shade of distrust painted in her eyes. “What do you want in return?”
“Your safety,” he responded immediately, not having to think about that question for even a second. He shoved his hands into his pockets in an attempt to make himself look smaller. “Look, you don’t know me from Adam. And any woman should be skepti
cal of a dude she just met, because the world is a hard place to live and generally speaking, men are assholes. But look, how do I say this… I’m not the kind of man who hurts people. There, that’s as plain as I can say it. It’s the truth. Take it or leave it.” He was up in a flash hopping over the back of the couch and backing away from her, toward the front door. “But I hope you take it. At least for tonight. Just don’t go back to a dangerous situation simply because you don’t trust me. Seriously, lock me out if you want. I won’t come back until the morning.”
He was almost all the way to the front door when he saw one more thing he needed to take care of.
She still hadn’t moved from the other side of the room. He had no clue what the hell she was thinking, but he figured he had done the best he could.
He strode back into the room and she flinched a little, but he didn’t approach her. Not wanting to intrude on her space in the room, he grabbed the cord of the vacuum and started yanking it toward him. Damn. That piece of shit was heavy! No wonder why she’d been wincing as she’d tried to wield it.
He dragged it toward him and he answered the question in her eyes. “I don’t want you hurting yourself trying to use this thing.”
When he’d dragged it all the way to his side, Atlas rolled it to the front door. He turned back and she still stood in the living room, just watching him. “Lock up after me.”
And then he let his door close after him and marched over to his brother’s, vacuum and all.
CHAPTER THREE
It was the shower that did it.
It had been six long months since Rebecca had been able to take a completely private, completely relaxed shower and she simply didn’t have the strength to pass it up.
She waited until his footsteps faded away and then she threw every single lock on his door.
Once the idea of a shower had been planted, she knew there was no way of shaking it loose. It was only 5:45 pm, but she figured if she showered and went to bed now, then she’d be able to wake up super early, finish cleaning his place—sans vacuum—and get out of there before he came back.
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