Renegade by Cambria Hebert Read Free Book Online

hard to wrap my head around the fact that she’d never left this island and had barely any contact with others. I watched as she took a long loaf of bread with a golden crust out of a cupboard and handed it to me. “Slice this, please,” she said.
     
    Eventually I found a knife and started sawing away at the bread.
     
    After a few minutes, Ana spoke. “I guess it’s okay. I am meant to help Heven and you’re helping her so I don’t think it would be a problem for you to be here.”
     
    She didn’t sound one hundred percent convinced, but I wasn’t going to point that out. I was hungry and didn’t want her to kick me out before I got to eat.
     
    “What in the world are you doing to that baguette?” She gasped and snatched the knife out of my hand.
     
    “Cutting it?” I asked. “Like you told me.”
     
    “More like maiming it!” She laughed. “Maybe you should sit down before more innocent bystanders are harmed.”
     
    I snatched a hunk of the mutilated bread and jumped up to sit on the counter. “Doesn’t taste mutilated.”
     
    Ana shook her head. “We have chairs.”
     
    “I didn’t want to rob you of my presence by going way over there.”
     
    She laughed out loud. I wanted to hear the sound again.
     
    A few minutes later, she handed me a full plate with buttered bread, an omelet with veggies and cheese, and a side of bacon. I shoved as much as I could into my mouth. “This is way better than Jeeves’s.”
     
    “So if you don’t cook and this Jeeves is so bad at it, what do you eat?”
     
    “Power bars, snack cakes, mostly junk. I do go up to Earth and get pizza and stuff sometimes.”
     
    “I don’t know what any of that is,” Ana said. “Except for pizza. That’s pretty good.”
     
    “All these years and you’ve never had Ho Hos?”
     
    “What?”
     
    I set down my now empty plate and grabbed my bag. I dumped the contents onto the counter where we were eating. About a dozen snack cakes fell out along with an iPod, some ear buds, and some power bars.
     
    “What is all this?” Ana asked, smiling.
     
    “Treasure,” I said, pushing aside the oatmeal cream pie and the Nutty Buddies and grabbing up the package of Ho Hos. I tore open the clear wrapper and snatched Ana’s fork out of her hand and shoved one of the chocolate covered rolls under her nose. “Eat this.”
     
    She took the snack in her fingers and smelled it.
     
    “A bite. Take a bite,” I said.
     
    She bit into the chocolate and then pulled it back. I could see the swirls of white cream in the center.
     
    “Well?”
     
    “I see why you live off these. It’s heavenly.”
     
    I smiled smugly. “Coming from an angel, that’s high praise.” Then I paused. “You are an angel, aren’t you?”
     
    “Yes,” she answered, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was peeling the chocolate coating off the cake and eating it. I watched, fascinated, as she ate all the icing and then began to unroll the chocolate cake and use her finger to eat the white cream.
     
    “What are you doing?” I asked. I usually shoved the whole thing in my mouth at once.
     
    She looked up. The bright green of her eyes shocked me sometimes. “Enjoying this.”
     
    I opened up an oatmeal cream pie and the Nutty Buddies. “Here, try these.”
     
    “All of them?”
     
    “Won’t know which one you like best until you do.”
     
    I ate the bacon off her plate while she tried all the different snacks laid before her. When she sampled them all, I asked for the verdict.
     
    “I like this one best,” she said, pointing to the Ho Hos.
     
    “The ladies love chocolate,” I said, half to myself.
     
    “What ladies?”
     
    “Never mind,” I said, finishing off the oatmeal cream pie. “So where’s your wings?”
     
    “My wings? I don’t have any. There’s no need with the job I do here. They would just get in the way.”
     
    I looked down at her plate of food and she pushed it toward me. I didn’t have to be told