“Hey, handsome!” Rebecca said, smiling when she saw him standing there, which should have pleased him, but…

Christ, he wasn’t sure that he could take anymore.

Every day she greeted him with a huge smile and a new and terrifying way to kill time. The first night of her doctor ordered bed rest she’d suggested a friendly game of Monopoly. Even though he normally avoided playing board games because of his intense dislike of losing, he’d figured that he could handle one night of letting her win if it would make her happy and get her mind off her current situation.

What he hadn’t counted on was Rebecca turning into a fucking psycho as soon as the dice were rolled. She went from being cute and bored to vicious and calculating. She’d taken her time, learning the way he played, his property preferences and before he’d realized what happened, she’d managed to outmaneuver him, built monopolies and completely destroyed him.

That’s when he got serious.

He’d challenged her to a rematch, but apparently the little demon had already lost interest, leaving him fuming for the rest of the night. It wasn’t that she’d beaten him, it was that she’d fucked with his head while doing it and she’d done it every fucking day since.

But that was fine, because tonight that bullshit was finally coming to an end.

“How was your day?” she asked from the bed where a dozen books, DVDs, magazines and empty Hershey Kiss wrappers surrounded her.

Instead of answering her, because he’d learned his lesson last night when he’d tried to distract her from her latest challenge, he reached down, picked her up and carried her out of the room.

“No checkers?” she asked with an adorable little pout that he wasn’t falling for.

Not this time.

He’d learned that lesson when she’d suggested they play Tetris.

“Thank God,” Melanie said, sighing with relief when she spotted them heading for the door.

“Walking Dead marathon when I get back, biatch!” she said with a huge smile and that devious glint in her eye that he knew so well.

She was purposely fucking with her best friend’s head for the hell of it.

“You’re evil,” he said, chuckling as he carried her across the hallway towards his apartment.

“I got bored,” she admitted with a shrug as she reached over and opened his apartment door for him. “So, what are we doing tonight?”

Grinning, he stepped inside his apartment and kicked his door shut behind them. “Research.”

*-*-*-*

“How exactly is this research?” she couldn’t help but ask from her position on the couch where he’d placed her three hours ago and handed her the television remote.

“Because I need to test a few recipes on someone,” he said from the large, heavy-duty kitchen island that Melanie would probably kill him for if she ever found out about it.

“And how does me being here help?” she couldn’t help but ask since she wasn’t exactly in the position to help him right now.

Not unless he was going to stop being so freaking anal about following that damn aftercare sheet that he carried everywhere, she thought. But, since he “consulted” with that damn list every five minutes to make sure that she was doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing to ensure a full recovery, she really doubted that he was going to let her help.

He wouldn’t even let her walk and if he found out that she did, and he always did thanks to that betraying bitch that she loved more than anything, he would pull out that damn piece of paper, read the whole thing over even though he already had it memorized, and glare at her until she promised that she wouldn’t do it again. Not that he believed her, but at least he would let the matter drop.

“Because you’re going to be my guinea pig,” he said, shooting her a wink as though that was going to somehow stop her from panicking.

He wanted to use her as a guinea pig to test recipes? Because spending a week curled up in her bed praying for death was so much fun that she would jump at the chance to make that dream a reality? Yeah, no she was good.

“Umm, you do remember that slight problem of me not being able to digest gluten without becoming violently ill, right?” she reminded him as she gave up on watching him work and returned to scrolling through horror movie selections on Netflix, thoroughly disappointed with this month’s selection.

“It’s all gluten free,” he said, sounding excited, which was actually kind of cute coming from a large man packed with muscle and a serial killer glare.

“Really?” she asked, unable to help but smile at his excitement, because he was definitely cute.

Not that she would actually tell him that since it would just result in one of those glares and probably some bitching since men like Lucifer didn’t like to be called cute. God, he really was a lot of work, she thought with a sigh as she settled on Dexter, deciding that it was close enough.

Maybe she should go back to her place and screw with Melanie’s head some more? she thought, because the idea of being anyone’s gluten-free guinea pig wasn’t exactly how she wanted to spend her incredibly boring night. After living the past few weeks gluten-free, she could honestly say that she was now prepared to live on a diet of chocolate and carrot sticks.

At first she’d been really excited to discover that there was a gluten free version for pretty much everything that she liked to eat. Thanks to her visit to Dixon’s Gluten Free Bakery, she’d been pretty optimistic about her gluten-free prospects. Then she tried to cook gluten free pasta…

That had been the beginning of the end.

Gluten free muffins, pancakes, toaster pastries, and so on and so forth all ended up being huge disappointments and incredibly expensive. Everything came in smaller packages for at least four times the cost of the normal stuff. Flour, pasta, cereal, it was all too expensive, bland and in some cases, terrifying.

Some of the food was crunchy, some, like the Oreo knockoffs, fizzed in her mouth as they dissolved. The taste, god, the taste was…

Well, she really didn’t want to think about the taste or the after taste for that matter.

Since she’d ended up blowing her entire paycheck on food that she couldn’t stomach, she’d decided to keep it simple, meat, veggies, fruit, Hershey’s chocolate and gallons upon gallons of Coke. The only time she made an exception to this rule was when she went to Dixon’s Bakery and that wasn’t often since she usually found herself spending too much money there.