Page 67 of Maverick

I nod, taken aback by his directness. Apparently Ransom doesn't do small talk; he cuts straight to the heart of things.

"You guys seem to have a work hard, play hard attitude. Have you always been like that?"

He scratches idly at his cheek, chuckling as Maverick and Jonas devolve into a slap fight over who gets to take the cookies off the tray and move them to the wire rack. Nan isn't even trying to break up the fight. She's in full on grandma mode, letting the kids run amok.

"Nah, not at the beginning. You can't help but learn to be okay with chaos. There were nine of us, all sharing a small space. There was a lot of stupidity and annoying the fuck out of each other. But once we started to make some money, things got more fun. It's hard to think about fun when you're stuck in survival mode. I'm guessing you know a little something about that?"

"Yeah, I guess I do. I didn't grow up with many worries, but the last couple of years have been…hard."

"She was sick?" he asks quietly, watching Nan with old eyes.

"Cancer. We lost my grandpa years ago to it, so I think both of us were expecting the worst, you know?"

"But she made it."

"She did. She surprised everyone. She likes to tell everyone that she was too ornery to die, but I think she just had too much left that she wanted to do."

His gaze is knowing. "Or someone really important to live for."

"I don't know what I'd do without her," I admit. "She's my whole world, which is scary, you know? Loving someone that much is a very…vulnerable thing."

His massive chest inflates as he pulls in a deep, long breath. "They hold your heart in their hands, and when they go, everything is dark."

Dark perfectly describes the way it felt when Pops died. Like all the light and air and life was sucked out of the room. "Yeah."

"It's tempting to just…close up when that happens. To never let anybody in. To stay alone, and isolated."

"Someone mentioned you lost your people when you were young too. But you didn't do that. You didn't isolate yourself."

"I did at first. Feeling that kind of pain," he says, mouth twisting, "I didn't want to ever feel that again. And maybe I didn't believe I deserved anyone or anything good."

I think I'm there a little bit. Not that I don't deserve anything good, but that I have to take care of what's good. I have to stay vigilant, so I don't lose Nan. "What changed then? How did you get past that."

He crosses his arms over his chest and stares blindly out the wall of glass beside us. "I fought every step of the way. But finally, someone pointed out I was," his face cracks into a smile, "being a fucking idiot and to get my head out of my ass."

"Must have been someone important to have such an impact on you."

"Yeah," he says simply, leaving me with so many questions. But I'm good enough at reading people to know that he's not going to answer them. Not those ones at least. But I have other things I desperately want to know.

"When you decided to build a family, you sure went at it with gusto. Why? What made you do what you did? You were young too, just a teenager, right?"

"Fifteen, when I started. As for why so many?" He grins and props his elbow on the back of the couch. "I needed them all. We needed each other."

"I think you're lucky," I tell him seriously. "They're lucky you pulled them together, yeah, but you're damned lucky to have them too."

"I know," he says simply, studying me. "That's how we operate, you know. We pull people in, people we think are pretty damned special, and we never let them go."

"But not in a creepy, stalker way, right?"

His smile shifts, turns a mix of playful and mysterious. "Whatever gets the job done."

"The job?"

"My family, happy and healthy. That's always the job. The only job."

He sounds like a good dad. And I really want to make sure I stay on his good side, because I get the feeling Ransom's bad side is…well, a bad place to be.

"How are things going at Mav's place? Things between you two…good?" he asks in a lighter tone. Does he know he freaked me out a little? Probably.

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