Chapter 5 #3
“You asked, Nadine.” He looked at her mouth, still glistening from where she had wetted it with her tongue. “Did you want me to lie and say it was because you looked sweet? Because you do—but you can still be sweet, even if you kiss like you don’t want to be.”
She inhaled sharply; it sounded breathless. That’s an interesting reaction.
He settled back in his chair, no longer even bothering to hide his delight as her chest rose and fell with manufactured outrage. A shy little firebrand, shooting off sparks. Too hazed with fear to know her own passion. God, how he wanted to fuck her. He knew it would be good.
“Next question,” she said, with effort.
“No. You’ve used them all.”
“I have two left!”
“No, darling. You asked a follow-up about your sister and Ben, if you’ll recall. And the last one you asked me, just now, was about how I dared. I made sure to explain myself fully.”
She sputtered delightfully. “That wasn’t a question!”
“But I answered it.” He flicked his napkin from his lap and dropped it on his plate.
“I might answer more if you kiss me again. But since you’ve rejected our initial agreement, you should know that I’ll be seeking out specific performance from you, the breaching party.
” He checked to make sure she was still watching him; she was.
“Are you up to performing for a breach?”
A gasp sounded from behind them and Cal glanced over his shoulder to see the hovering waitress, one hand clapped over her mouth as she held the check in her other hand.
Taking advantage of his distraction, Nadine slipped free from the booth and fled, pingponging off the side of a table in her panicked dash for the restroom.
“Um.” Color flooded the waitress’s face as her eyes bounced from Nadine’s empty seat to him. “Here’s the check. Is everything . . . all right?”
“Yes. Thank you.” He tried to keep the impatience from his voice as his eyes lingered on the door where Nadine had disappeared.
The waitress continued to hover as he wrote down his signature. “Are you a lawyer?”
Cal dropped the pen onto the pad and handed both back. “Why? Do you need one?”
Hope flared anew in her eyes. “Is she your client?”
“My clients pay for their own lunches.” He slipped the receipt into his pocket. “And I bill for mine,” he added, allowing a note of reproof to sharpen his words.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” she stammered, turning pink. “You just have a really nice voice. Are you on social media?”
“Not if I can help it.” He smiled without meaning to. It was not a nice smile and they both knew it. “Excuse me. I need to find my companion before she manages to escape me again.”
The again made her stumble back as he grabbed his jacket.
He walked purposefully to the gingham-papered foyer just as Nadine slipped out of the bathroom, red-faced and thwarted, like she had been planning on sneaking right past him and out the door.
She gave him a defiant look as he loomed over her, folding her arms over her chest.
“I suppose she gave you her number.”
Another smile tugged at his mouth. “Not her number. I told her I wasn’t on social media.”
“That’s too bad,” she said disinterestedly.
As they walked out to the car, he wondered if she had scrubbed through his limited internet presence the way he had gone through hers. Most people were shocked if you told them you weren’t online. Nadine, who was very easily shocked indeed, hadn’t batted an eye.
Have you been stalking me, little sparrow?
“Let me ask you something.” He swung himself into the driver’s seat, sliding his long legs into the recess beneath the wheel. “What do you get out of this? Coming here. Stirring up old bones. What are you hoping to find?”
“My sister,” she said stubbornly.
“I know that. But why not leave it to the police? Or the sheriff?”
She sighed. “Maybe it’s crazy. But Noelle is all I have.
And until I f-find her, I’ll always be fearing the worst. It’s like Schrodinger’s box—it feels like she’s alive and dead, all at the same time.
” Tears glistened in her eyes. “And I’ll feel like it’s my fault, if I don’t look hard enough.
If I don’t care enough. I’ll blame myself for it until the day I die if something happens to her. ”
He moved so quickly that she startled, quailing back against the car door at the touch of his hand on her jeans. Smoothing his thumb over the rise of her kneecap, he said, “It’s not your fault.”
A choking sob left her. He saw her lips move silently—yes it is.
“Oh, Nadine.” He spread his fingers, just brushing the ridges of fabric where the denim broke into folds at the back of her knee.
She gasped, looking trapped. But you want this, darling.
He pressed his nails into the fabric. You need it.
“Sweet Nadine. You can’t take on a burden like that. It’s going to crush your little wings.”
“You know I don’t trust you.” But she didn’t move her leg, and he didn’t move his hand.
“I know. I don’t trust you, either. And yet—” He traced higher up her thigh, giving her leg a squeeze as he followed the seam of her jeans inward. Towards her warmth. She was breathing harder than she had been before. “Sometimes a lack of trust makes it that much more exciting. Don’t you agree?”
She squirmed, not responding. The movement shifted his fingers to her lap.
Cal looked at her lost, miserable face and pressed hard between her legs.
She made a choking little gasp when his fingers moved, her hand going white on the door handle, so he did it again, sliding upwards slowly, with increasing pressure, until he heard her breath catch.
Well, well. He ground his thumb against that spot, dragging the rough fabric over her clit in a way that had her thighs squeezing his hand. Riding him. There you are.
“I know a scenic lookout point near here.” Cal eased off the pressure, retreating to the warm, smooth expanse of her thigh. “Beautiful but not quite in season. I could take you there, lay you down just out of sight, and make you forget your own name. What do you think of that?”
Her eyes, which had started to look glazed, slipped closed. And then she pulled her leg away, making his hand fall harmlessly to the leather seat. “No.”
There were saints who had that look of noble, pious endurance. But he imagined certain kinds of demons might wear it as well. Rubbing his fingers together, now slippery with the barest traces of her arousal, Cal had an idea about which direction Nadine herself might be inclined.
Shaking his head, he leaned over the console, forcing her to look at him. “Why are you fighting this?” he asked, a hint of frustration in his voice. He cursed himself for that, for showing his cards before he was ready to play his hand. For wanting what he could not want.
Nadine’s eyes opened. Still breathing fast, she said breathlessly, “Why do you like it?”
The question should have startled him, but after what she had asked in the diner, he already knew how much she saw. That was why she was here and it was why she had caught his attention the first time he’d seen her almost a year ago exactly.
A beautiful woman in a scarlet dress with the saddest eyes he’d ever seen.
“That’s a dangerous question,” he said at last.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think you’d like the answer.”
She wasn’t quite close enough to kiss but his breath stirred the loose hairs around her face, disturbing her look of composure. “I don’t—are you saying you’re dangerous?”
“Yes.” He didn’t hesitate.
She gulped. “To me?”
“Especially to you, little sparrow.”
Perversely, this nearly seemed to sway her. He saw it—the desire to yield warring with her contrarian nature, and the way she looked at his mouth. It seemed that brutal honesty could affect her like a hand around the throat, and that was the one thing he could not afford to give her.
If she had moved towards him, he would have kissed her. He would have gripped her by that fall of rich, luxurious hair and pulled until she bent her neck, taking her mouth as roughly as he longed to take the rest of her. If she had given him an inch, he would have taken it.
Instead, he took her home.