Chapter 2 #2
“Did she talk about me? Tell me the truth.”
“She didn’t say a word about you,” Jenny said with a straight face.
“Nothing at all? I’m gutted, crushed, devastated.”
“You’re also very dramatic.” Amused, Erin handed over a twenty to pay for the winterberry and took the ten in change. “Let’s get going. We’ve got a tree to decorate.”
“I’ll see you tonight,” Jenny said.
“See you then.”
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do in the meantime,” she whispered to Erin. “Which means anything goes.”
“Shut it!” Erin said, leaving Jenny laughing.
While Slim put the tree in the back of his pickup truck, she got into the cab that smelled of his distinctive cologne. If rakish sex appeal, quick wit and sharp intelligence could be captured in a scent, whatever he wore did the trick for her.
He got into the truck and fired it up, blasting the heat. The frigid day was overcast and stormy, the kind of winter day she loved and the majority of sane people hated.
Erin never used to love winter as much as she did now, but the older she got, the more she enjoyed hibernating in the winter.
Although on Gansett Island, an endless array of social events kept everyone busy during the off-season, making hibernation difficult.
It was probably just as well, or she’d be a total hermit by now.
“Where to?” she asked as he pulled the truck onto the main road.
“Now we go to find some lights and ornaments for the tree.”
“I saw some stuff at the pharmacy last week. Not sure if it’s still there or sold out by now.”
“We’ll start there. If necessary, we’ll go beachcombing for ornaments.”
Erin liked the way he operated, how he didn’t sweat the small stuff and made the most mundane things, like eating breakfast, fun.
In that way, he was her polar opposite. She sweated everything—big stuff and small.
She was an obsessive over-thinker, which was why she’d shocked not only him but herself with the spontaneous invitation to stay with her.
For once, she hadn’t taken the time to think the plan through from every possible angle and outcome. She’d just acted, and the look on his face had been priceless and well worth the lack of dithering that would normally precede such a decision.
She hadn’t always been this way. At one time, she’d driven her parents insane with the number of times she’d changed her major before settling on pre-law.
Her spontaneity had gotten her in trouble on more than one occasion, never more so than when perpetrating pranks with her equally mischievous twin. That side of her had died with him.
She’d read once about a man who’d detested chocolate until he had surgery and awoke from the anesthesia craving chocolate.
Similarly, Erin had emerged on the other side of her tremendous loss a completely different person.
Even all these years later, she was still getting to know that new person—and new Erin was someone else altogether when Slim Jackson was around.
Rediscovering the lighthearted girl she used to be had been an interesting side effect of her friendship with him.
She’d nearly forgotten that girl had once resided inside her, but finding her again after all this time was like a revelation in and of itself.
And that, more than anything, was why she’d asked him to stay.
She liked how she felt when he was around—unburdened, hopeful, giddy, aroused, breathless, off-balance.
Those feelings also made her nervous for what would happen after he left again. His invitation to join him in Florida had stunned her. But what had stunned her even more was how much she wanted to take him up on it.
He was slowly but surely dragging her out of the shell she’d crawled into long ago, hiding from the parts of life she found too painful to deal with.
Inside that shell, she was safe and protected from things that could hurt her.
The thought of a life outside the shell made her shudder in fear of what happened when you loved someone too much and they were ripped from your life suddenly and without warning.
“Are you cold?” Slim asked, turning up the heat.
“Little bit,” she said, rather than confess to the fears that had her shuddering.
Being on the island had helped to crack the shell somewhat.
It was impossible to be around the people who lived here and not engage in meaningful relationships and new friendships.
They simply wouldn’t allow anyone to wallow by themselves for too long, and now there was a man who wasn’t going to allow her to wallow either.
At some point, she’d have to decide how far out of the shell she was willing to venture.
Slim parked the truck at the pharmacy and turned off the engine. “You okay over there? You’re awfully quiet.”
“Just thinking.”
“What I wouldn’t give to know what goes on inside that head of yours.”
Erin laughed at the way he said that. “It’s probably better that you don’t.”
“I don’t know about that. Wait for me.”
At first she didn’t know what he meant, and then he was opening her door and helping her out of the truck. “While I appreciate your manners, I’m perfectly capable of getting out by myself.”
“You get me, you get my manners, too, sweetheart.” He also held the door to the pharmacy for her and ushered her in ahead of him with a hand to her lower back.
As a fully self-sufficient woman, she wanted to argue some more about his need to play the role of protective alpha man.
But she enjoyed the courtesy too much to protest. She’d never been with a man who was so consistent about holding doors, and though it would take some getting used to, she decided she could live with his brand of gallantry.
They found a picked-over display of Christmas decorations in the front of the store. There were six boxes of white lights left, and he grabbed all of them.
“Why do we need so many lights?” Erin asked.
“My rule is, until it hurts to look at the tree, you don’t have enough lights. Six boxes ought to do it.”
“That’s ridiculous, but if you insist...”
“I do.” With the lights tucked under one arm, Slim reached for a box of gold ornaments.
Erin stopped him. “I like your beachcombing idea. It’s much more original than generic gold balls.”
“It’ll be cold out there today.”
“I can handle it if you can with your thin Florida blood.”
His rich, wicked-sounding laugh sent a bolt of heat rippling through her body. He was sexy all the time, but when he laughed or smiled, his sexiness reached incendiary levels. “You’re on, babe.”
And she liked when he called her that and sweetheart. She liked it an awful lot.