Free Golden's Rule by Billi Jean

creating a soft sound against the rim.
    Oh, he wasn’t being one hundred per cent honest, but not about what she referred to. How could he be? He didn’t know what the hell he was doing. But she wanted the truth, so he would give it to her. Maybe that would help her see her situation a little better.
    “All right. Look, you’re barely over an attack, with no memory, and you have no one but me. I don’t know how I’d do in your position.”
    She exhaled and tipped her pink lips upward in a faint smile. “Yeah, no doubt your big bad self would be out knocking some heads to get some information.”
    He laughed again. “Yeah, probably.” He liked how she called him on his shit. No one did that. No one probably dared.
    “Huh. Well, what good would that do? I mean, I could go back to where you found me and start asking questions—”
    Instantly he cut her off. “No way, that would be dangerous. The Midway is in chaos right now and—”
    She held up a hand palm outward and laughed. “Okay, okay, I have a brain. I do know how to use it.”
    He laughed. What else was there to do? She said that so snappily he could tell she was only partially teasing him. Had he offended her worse than he thought?
    “So, anyway, Mr Know-it-All, I was going to say—before you interrupted me—” She paused and gave him a ‘duh’ look that made him cough out a laugh. Damn, she was hot. “That going back where you found me might not be the way to go. But I do need to do something. I mean, you’ve done so much already, but I am a fighter, you know?”
    He frowned. How did she know that? “How do you know that?”
    “I don’t know, I just do, is all. It’s hard to explain, but I can’t deny when I think of the Death Stalkers, I know that I’ve always fought against their dark curse.”
    She glanced down at the table and fisted her small hand again. He reached out before he thought better of it, and cupped his hand over hers. She gave him a surprised look, but didn’t pull away. He saw the confusion on her face, more at her own thoughts, he hoped, than at his touching her. The thought of her fighting again gave his heart a painful leap. He had been unable to focus with her battling so near him. So easily she could have been ripped from him. Did she know that? How fragile life truly was?
    Her skin was so soft he wondered what he’d do when she touched him. If she touched you, douchebag. If.
    “Look, it won’t help to go out there trying to find a fight until your memories surface. It’s not even been a day. Maybe they simply need time. Maybe they’ll come to you.” The need to soothe her, remove the misery from her green eyes was foreign to him, but it was there, pounding at his frontal lobe almost as insistently as the hard-on throbbing under his jeans.
    He pushed back from the table, and not letting go of her hand, pulled her up with him. She stood willingly, merely giving him a small smile for his manhandling her if the twinkle in her gorgeous eyes meant anything. “Let’s go relax. Dinner was the best thing I’ve had in way too long, but you need to rest and the living room has some nice couches.” Nice, big enough for two couches that he intended to put to some good use.
    She hesitated, slanting a curious look up at him, and he had the feeling she’d just interpreted that comfy couch excuse like a truth seer spotted a white lie.
    “What about the dishes?”
    He ignored her question and guided her down the hallway to the open living room. They made it halfway inside the room before Beauty ground to a halt. One glance at her face and that damned warmth in his chest spread. She liked books. Her face glowed with pleasure as she stood there eyeing the shelves like he’d led her into a room full of buried treasure. She dropped his hand and walked in a daze to the nearest shelf, tenderly tracing her fingers over the spine of a leather-bound volume bigger than her head.
    Watching her, he settled against the back of the