Page 20 of Protected By the BRATVA Grump

"I know." Her mouth is against my ear. "I'm as shocked as you are."

Then, "Take me to bed, Jasper."

Delilah

The thing about Jasper is that he never announces anything. He simply starts doing it, and by the third morning it’s become the way things have always been.

He’s been staying at my place every night and comes into work with me every morning, and this morning is no different.

The dairy crates are still stacked on the step where the dairy delivery leaves them, and by the time I've untied my apron strings and retied them properly, the crates are inside by the fridge and Jasper is holding the door open with his hip while Lucifer conducts a full security inspection of his boots.

"He’s beginning to like you," I tell him.

"He liked Eduard straight away." He mutters, nudging the last crate through with his foot. "I thought we had an understanding," he says to the cat.

Duchess has taken to sitting on the high shelf directly above wherever he stands, which I have chosen to interpret as approval.

He knows where the spare filters live. He knows which cupboard door sticks and lifts it half an inch before he pulls, the way I do, the way I never told him to. Yesterday he came back from somewhere with a new washer for the tap in the back kitchen, the one that has been dripping since Christmas. Then he fitted it while I was proving dough, and when I turnedaround it had stopped dripping and he had already moved on to something else entirely.

My love language is feeding people. His is fixing things before I remember to mention it.

The oven timer goes off at ten past eight and, for the first time in living memory, I am standing directly in front of it when it does. The cinnamon buns come out the exact color they're supposed to be. I set the tray down and look at it with the reverence of a woman witnessing a rare bird.

"They look good." He drinks his coffee. "It's a very restrained thought. I'm proud of it."

Old Bill arrives at nine on the dot with his paper folded under his arm, and I have his Danish down before he's finished lowering himself into his chair. Sammie comes through at twenty past with her coat already part way off and Lilah in her pram and her coat already half off. Eduard follows two minutes later, takes his corner table, and Lucifer abandons his post at the till to go and sit on the laminated reserved sign as though he has been personally waiting all night.

Somewhere in the middle of it I look up and find that Mrs. Aldridge has recruited Jasper to carry her pastry box to the car, which he does without any visible sign that he has been asked, and that Bill has begun addressing him directly on matters of national importance.

It's such a small thing. I remember the first time he ever came into the café, he spoke to Eduard in Russian and left. Never even stayed for coffee. Now he's here first thing every morning fixing taps and being useful, and the whole room has absorbed him so completely that I'd bet money not one of these people could tell you when it happened.

I know when it happened. It happened the night he walked me home.

Lilah settles the argument at ten, in her own way. Sammie has her against her shoulder doing the bounce that usually works, and Lilah is building toward something operatic, going red around the ears in a way that means the next ten minutes belong to her. I come out from behind the counter, drying my hands on my apron, and say something completely idiotic in the voice I only use with her.

She stops. Turns her head. Reaches for me with both arms and a very serious expression. When Sammie hands her over, she pushes her face into the side of my neck and grabs a fistful of my hair like she's claiming property.

The whole café goes soft at the edges.

"Well," says Sammie, wounded. "That's lovely. Nine hours of labor.Nine, very long, hours of labor."

"She has excellent taste." I turn a slow circle with a baby attached to me, patting her back, and Lilah lets out one enormous sigh directly into my collarbone and passes out cold.

Over by the corner table, Eduard says something quiet in Russian.

"He says she's got the right idea," Sammie translates having picked up a few regular words since living with Eduard. "He also says something rude about Jasper that I'm choosing not to repeat in front of the baby."

I glance across before I can stop myself. Jasper is leaning at the end of the counter with the mug in both hands, and he isn't looking at Eduard at all. He's looking at me, and at the four-month-old drooling into my apron, and there's an expression on his face I have never seen there before. It's gone by the time I've registered it, packed away behind the usual careful nothing, butheat crawls all the way up my throat and I have to turn around and pretend the pastry case needs rearranging.

It doesn't. I rearrange it anyway, one handed.

The rush breaks around eleven, and that's when Bill hits his newspaper hard enough with the back of his hand to make Cookie sit up.

"Here," he says. "Delilah. Sammie. Look at this."

He's holding the front page out at arm's length, the way he does when his glasses are on his head, which they are.

The headline runs across the top in the biggest type they've used since the flooding two winters ago.