The rest of that day feels strange and dreamy, like something’s shifted in our relationship. Like something that started based on sheer desire, sheer lust has somehow changed.

Bianca’s given herself to us completely. Not just her body but her heart, and suddenly, I feel even more tender toward her, like she’s not only something I need to protect but someone I need to care for.

I think I knew it all along. I didn’t just hand her my heart. She’s had it all this time.

I just hadn’t realized it yet.

The night passes, Bianca snuggled in between us. In the morning I wake up hard, my cock already between her legs, and she reaches back and slides me inside her before I’m even properly awake. Beckett’s eyes open, and then his hand is on her clit, rubbing and massaging.

Bianca comes first. Then she pulls me out, moves her hips, positions me at her back entrance.

“Please,” she says, her beautiful eyes wide, and I do. I go slow and I’m gentle but she’s so fucking tight that I nearly come right there. Just knowing that I’m here, with her, that this girl is letting me fuck her like this.

I come so hard my ears pop.

* * *

Hours later, there’s a knock on the door. Beckett and I both leap to our feet, instantly going for the guns we have stashed in a few drawers around the place. Neither of us like them, but we’ve been here nearly two weeks and this is the first time someone’s knocked.

“Go around that corner,” I tell Bianca. “Stay close, but out of sight of the door. Beckett, keep an eye on her, just in case this is a trap again.”

They both obey. Good. We can’t have a repeat of the Günther situation.

Slowly, my gun hand behind my back, I open the door. Somewhere in my brain I know that a person who wants the three of us dead is unlikely to knock, but you can never be too cautious.

But when I see the person who knocked, I have to rethink that. Just a little.

It’s a kid with bad skin and a worse haircut. He’s skinny and lanky and can’t be more than seventeen, looks totally and completely freaked out at my eye, staring at him from the doorway.

He swallows, and his too-large Adam’s apple bobs in his throat.

“Delivery?” he squeaks out, holding up two shopping bags.

And I’m suspicious again. We haven’t ordered anything. That’s not something we’d do, give that we’re hiding out. People in lockdown don’t order groceries.

“They’re not ours,” I growl.

He checks a piece of paper.

“Um, is this the ancestral hunting cabin of the family Munchveld?” he asks.

I don’t answer.

“Because that’s where I’m supposed to deliver it, but if this is the wrong ancestral cabin let me know, my GPS doesn’t really work up here and it likes addresses rather than vague descriptions anyway?”

“What is it?”

“What’s what?”

I roll my eyes.

“In the bags.”

“Um. I don’t know, this one’s got, like, some bread, and some cheese, and there’s a thing of jam and butter, and then on the bottom it looks like, ooh, strawberries, don’t know who put things on top of those, not protocol at all, and then there’s a whole bunch of apples and like some sort of, I don’t know, turnip?”

I frown, watching him root around in the bag. It’s pretty clearly not a bomb from the way he’s shoving items left and right, probably squashing the hell out of everything.

“Where’s it from?”

“Andersen’s, down in Inversberg? My boss said that you meant to order this stuff a couple days ago, but then you left without paying and something got confused in the system but then yesterday it spat out an error saying that your order was still missing, and so we found your account and just charged it to that, it shouldn’t be too much, and we figured that it was better to err on the side of...”

“I’ll take them, it’s fine,” I say, opening the door and grabbing the bags. “Thanks. Sorry for the mix-up.”

“Oh! No problem, I’ve always wanted to see the Munchveld ancestral cabin in person, my grandma was always going on about it...”

I give the poor kid a hard look. He jams his hands into his pockets.

“Right! Have a nice day, sir,” he says, and turns around, walking back to the SUV he came in and I close the door, locking all three locks.

“We got groceries?” Beckett says.

“Yup,” I say.

I’m still slightly nervous that this was some sort of recon for the hacker group, that something just happened that I don’t understand, but there are no alarms going off. Nothing about this scenario really made me suspicious, once it got explained — my family has had this cabin for a long time.

We do order groceries from Andersen.

That really was a pimple-faced delivery boy.

I explain the whole situation with the mix-up to Beckett and Bianca, and we stash the groceries in the fridge. It’ll be nice to have fresh stuff tonight, after all, and then we forget the whole thing. Write it off as a weird quirk that happens in small towns, where everyone knows everything.

A few hours later I’m doing a crossword in the living room when Bianca walks past me, tossing an apple up and down in one hand.

“I’m gonna go have a snack and read in the study,” she says. “My night to make dinner?”

“Sounds good,” I say, and she walks off.