Robin des Bois ✓

six. Yours Truly

BEFORE YOU READ THIS CHAPTER: the guy who showed up at Isis' doorstep in the last chapter is not Alexei. If you reread the first chapter (and I think I mention him in the second one too), there is a guy who sits just a few seats away from her in the lit class, and she sketched him a couple of times. So yeah. That's that. I hope you enjoy this chapter!

I made coffee.

He looked perplexed as I very softly asked him if he'd like to sit with me in the kitchen and offered to make him an warm cup of coffee. I couldn't help it –my ingrained good manners took over and all I could think about was proper etiquette.

Never mind that I was basically inviting a drug lord to sit in my kitchen and enjoy a cup of Foldgers coffee –that didn't seem to register with me. My brain had opted for autopilot mode and I went through the motions of preparing our coffees like a robot, without even thinking about it.

"What do you like in your coffee, sugar, cream?"

Somewhere deep inside my mind a little voice was telling me that this was a bad idea, but it was already too late as he informed me that he'd just be taking it with two spoons of sugar.

I set the two chipped mugs on both sides of the table and sat opposite him, grabbing my cup gingerly and stubbornly staring down at my coffee, unable to meet his eyes.

"You're lucky, you know?"

I jumped in my seat and looked up at him briefly, before I looked down at my coffee again without answering. I heard him take a sip of his coffee and then the dull thud of the cup being put back on the table.

"You are so very lucky that I recognized you and that I asked to be in charge of handling this. Trust me, if it was any other of my friends, you wouldn't be chatting over a cup of coffee right now. If there's one thing my boss doesn't appreciate, it's people stealing his merch from his own house."

Slowly, as though it was moving through sluggish mud, my brain thought of a question. "I'm sorry, but what is your name?" I asked in a quiet, small voice.

He paused, staring at me, looking stunned once again. "Gabriel Ferreira," he finally said slowly. I resisted the urge to say "nice to meet you".

And then, the connection was established and my gaze shot up to him, studying his features carefully, as I finally remembered why he'd seemed so familiar when I'd first seen him sitting just a few feet away from me in that 20th century lit class.

"Aren't you Alessandra's brother?" I asked, thinking of how Alessandra's just as dark eyes were framed by identical thick lashes and how her lips were as pulpous as his. Alessandra was just as shy and quiet as me and always helped out at pretty much every charity event I'd ever attended. Even though we barely ever spoke, I liked her, mostly because I felt a kindred spirit in her.

"Yeah," he said slowly and his eyes narrowed as he observed me. "And stop trying to change the subject. We both know why I'm here and it's time you start explaining yourself, before I get mad and stop being as nice as I've been so far."

I gulped as my gaze drifted to his arms, which under other circumstances I might've found quite nice to look at. At the moment, however, all I could image were his strong hands squeezing my neck. And even though I was fairly confident that my self-defence course had prepared me to fend off someone of my own size, and even someone fairly stronger, it was evident that the guy sitting in front of me had more experience in hand to hand combat than I would gather during my whole lifetime and that fact was making me shifty to say the least. Also, there was his leather jacket –and god knows what he hid underneath that –other than a pair of killer abs, I was sure.