15. Kade
Chapter 15
Kade
Having Presley in my truck feels oddly nice, natural even. There’s been several times where I’ve almost laid my hand on her thigh because of how natural it feels. But while tempting—very tempting—Presley would probably deck me, maybe even curse me out.
Though now that I think about it, maybe she wouldn’t curse. I haven’t heard a bad word out of her mouth yet. Makes me wonder if she’s one of those proper city girls or used to be a pastor’s kid who rebelled by looking different. The corners of my lips tug up as I think of the word fuck leaving her lips while I parted those pretty thighs currently filling out my passenger seat—
Ping!
I blink at the sound of the phone and return my full attention to the road. In my peripheral vision, I see Presley shift to take her cell from her back pocket and glance down at the screen. She tries to hide whatever reaction she has to the message, but she doesn’t do a very good job. Her body goes tense as her hands clench around the device.
I wonder if it’s Derek. I shouldn’t care who Derek is or if she’s upset. I shouldn’t care about her at all. Yet for the last twenty-four hours, Presley’s been all I can think about, taking up every nook and cranny of my mind.
I gave her space after she passed out since I wasn’t in the best mental place after my most recent argument with Gavin. I ended up spending the night at Jake’s, then this morning, I didn’t see Presley during chores. Blake must’ve told her to take the morning off after yesterday or had her doing something far away from me.
Yet while Presley wasn’t physically in front of me, I felt as if she was. Her blue eyes were stalking me from behind my eyelids.
I turn my head a bit to see her better as she puts her phone back in her pocket. Her lips move, and I swear I hear her listing off groceries or something under her breath. When I go to ask her about it, she turns her hardened gaze to me.
“Watch the road.”
I grin at her bossy tone but do as she said, even if I could drive to Night Hawk with my eyes closed. “I should’ve known you were a passenger-seat driver.”
“I’m not. But I don’t want to die.”
I chuckle. “I’m not going to kill you, Lemon. I wouldn’t be able to annoy you.”
I think she’s going to scold me for saying that, but instead, I spot the ghost of a smile on her lips. It’s not a full one, but it’s nice. That’s another thing I have yet to see her do: really smile or laugh. She hasn’t even done it with a customer.
I haven’t thought much about it until now.
“What would you do with your life if you couldn’t be annoying?” she asks.
A belly laugh erupts from my lips, and she jumps a bit at the sound. “You’re always surprising me.”
She screws up her face. “Why do you say that?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“We don’t know each other. In theory, wouldn’t I always surprise you?”
“That’s fair. I just thought I knew your type.”
Her gaze is fully on my profile like she’s trying to burn a hole in my face with laser-beam eyes. “My type ? What do you mean by that? ”
I shrug again and turn left down the town’s small main street. There’s not much out here—the bank, Allen’s General Store, The Diner, a couple of bars, and a Mexican food joint. Night Hawk is just on the outskirts of town.
Sometimes I joke Randall isn’t even a town, more like a blip on the map. A town everyone would look over if they were passing through unless they really needed to stop and use the bathroom.
“Tell me,” she prods. “What’s my type?”
I glance at her before looking back at the road. Her voice has an edge, and I know I’m going to have to tread carefully. “I mean no offense by this…”
She offers a derisive chuckle. “If you need to start with that, it’s going to be offensive.”
Yeah, this is not a good idea. I should’ve kept my big mouth shut. “Forget I said anything.”
“No. You don’t get out of a statement like that. I want to know what you see when you look at me.”
I grip the steering wheel and shift in my seat. I like this demanding side of her; it has me wanting to see more of it. I speculate if it would show up while in my bed or if it would take some coaxing. I bet— Jesus . I run my tongue against the back of my teeth and grip the wheel harder.
I need to stop imagining Presley as anything more than a friend—a distant friend—or I’m not going to be able to stay away. But the devil on my shoulder wonders if that would really be a bad thing. We work together, now practically live together, and she doesn’t really know me. It could be nice, though, to start semi-fresh with someone.
I’ve begun to think that she’s like me in some ways. She’s dealing with something—that much was obvious when I walked in on her crying earlier. And she overcame her smoking addiction, or at least found a way not to rely on it.
“Kade.”
I blink a few times, loosening my grip on the steering wheel .
“Are you really not going to answer me?”
“Sorry,” I say truthfully. “I don’t want you to get angry.”
“You haven’t let that stop you before.”
She’s right there. I collect my thoughts and blow out a breath. “When I first saw you, I thought you were another one of the city folk we get in here, people running from their life or wanting to escape for a bit. And with your purple hair and tattoos, I thought you were looking for attention, maybe someone or something to take your mind off things. But you surprised me, and you keep surprising me. Nothing I’ve thought about you so far has really been the case—except that you are a little sour.” I wink at her, trying to keep what I just said light.
Presley stays quiet, her chin dropping to her chest and hands clutching her black-fringed purse. Any lightness in the air has been sucked out, and the tension radiating off her has the hair on the backs of my arms standing on end.
“See, I told you I should’ve kept my mouth shut.”
She stays silent as I pull into Night Hawk. After I’ve parked, I think she’s going to jump out and run as far and fast as she can from me, but she doesn’t. I remove my seatbelt and turn toward her.
“Presley, I’m sorry.”
The sound of her name has her looking up at me. “What do you think of me now?”
My eyebrows raise. “Honestly, I don’t know. You’ve not given me a chance to get to know you.”
“And if I told you that you were right?”
My curiosity sparks. Is she running from something? Maybe this Derek guy? The idea has me feeling sick. “Then you would surprise me again,” I say.
Her searching eyes stare into mine, and the tension between us grows. But this is a different kind of tension, the kind right before something good or exciting happens. It has me even more tied up by whatever is going on between us…or not going on between us.
Just as our bodies move toward each other—as if an invisible rope is pulling us together—a sound makes Presley jump, her head whipping toward the disruptive noise.
“It was a car door,” I say, my voice quiet.
She licks her lips and unbuckles her seatbelt. “Thanks for the ride.” She turns her body and opens the door, hopping out of the truck so fast I swear I see a streak of purple in her wake.
I take a long inhale before blowing it out. I don’t know if she’s mad at me for what I said, but it seemed more like she was afraid, afraid that I’d figured a part of her out.
And now I have a million questions. I want to know if it’s Derek she’s running from. I want to know where she came from and why she picked Randall. I want to know everything.
Ping!
My gaze falls to the seat Presley just vacated to see her phone. I pick it up only to find the screen isn’t locked and there’s a text from this Derek guy. I shouldn’t look. I should respect her privacy. But I’ve never been good at doing what I should do.
DEREK: This is your replacement. I just gave her the job.
Replacement? What job? I tap the phone and see an image attached, an attractive blonde woman in a selfie with a man I assume is Derek. He’s got dark-red hair and tattoos up his neck and piercings on his face. He looks like a total douche with a smarmy grin and fake smiling eyes.
A new message comes in, and now I’m too curious to stop looking.
DEREK: You should hear her play.
DEREK: You fucked up the chance of a lifetime, Sweetheart.
I feel queasy at the Sweetheart nickname. I remember how she reacted when I called her that the first day we met, and now I understand why. God, I was a dick to her. Granted, I’ve been a dick to everyone lately.
I press the side button on her phone so the screen locks. She’ll probably know I’ve looked, but it’s too late now. Shame hits me, and I have the urge to come clean to her about what I just read.
I turn my focus to Night Hawk and see a group of people filtering in, the typical crowd that comes in for line-dancing night: women from surrounding towns and the city dressed in their shortest shorts and tightest tops with cowboy hats and boots. Normally, I look forward to these nights where I can dance and flirt and maybe get a horizontal partner for the evening. But that’s not anything I want right now.
I want Presley back in my car so we can talk. And not just surface-level chatter, either, but real talk about things that matter. I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted that with a woman. At least not in a long time.
How’s that saying go? Curiosity killed the cat? I hope I don’t end up going through more of my nine lives trying to figure out this city girl.
I thread my hands through my hair that’s in serious need of a trim before grabbing my hat from the backseat and placing it on my head. When I look in the rearview mirror, my hazel eyes stare back at me, and I fix a smile on my face, one that will get me through tonight.
I put my hand on the door handle to hop out of my truck, but then the passenger door flies open, and Presley climbs back in. Her wide eyes see her phone in my hand, but she doesn’t say anything about it. Instead, she closes the door and then stares straight ahead. After a few breaths of silence, I start to get worried.
“Presley?” I ask. “Everything okay?”
She turns her head to me like she forgot I was even here. “I can’t go back in there.”
I think of the texts I just saw. “Is it something to do with this Derek guy?”
She blinks, her eyes darting to her phone in my hand then back to me. “Did you read my messages?”
I hold her cell out to her, and she snatches it. “Just the newest ones,” I admit. “Your phone was unlocked, and— fuck , that’s no excuse, but I looked.”
Her brow pinches as she taps in her password to see the messages. Her body stills, going silent like the trees before a big storm.
“Presley?”
She squeezes her eyes shut then mutters something under her breath. It sounds like another grocery list—I think I heard chicken , dinosaur , then baseball bat . Her body only grows stiffer, the hand around her phone turning white before she reaches into her purse to pull out her hippie vape thing. She inhales then holds the vapor in before exhaling it out again. The smell of peppermint hits my nose, making it tingle a bit. She inhales another drag, then another, before she finally seems to calm down.
“Do you want me to take you back to the ranch?” I have no idea what happened inside Night Hawk, but it must have triggered the anxiety she mentioned to me yesterday. The texts only seemed to have sent her over the edge.
“We can’t leave Jake. He’ll fire me.”
I shake my head. “He won’t fire you. If he fired people, I would’ve been fired a long time ago.”
“I don’t want him to think I’m lazy. ”
“You’re not lazy. I saw you work yourself to the point of passing out yesterday. I’d hardly call that lazy.”
She shifts uncomfortably, probably remembering how embarrassed she was by the incident. Way to go, Kade. I hold back a sigh and take my phone out to make a call.
“Wait, what are you doing?” she panics. Her hand flies out to land on my forearm. I try to ignore how nice it feels to have her touch me as Jake’s voice comes through on the other end.
“Should I be worried you’re calling me?” Jake asks.
“Can you cover for Presley and me tonight? She’s not feeling well, and I’m going to take her back to the ranch.”
Presley’s nostrils flare, and she looks equal parts relieved and pissed.
“You’ve got it bad,” Jake chuckles.
“Never you mind,” I snap. He hasn’t stopped ribbing me since the whole drunken “my Lemon” thing.
I’d hoped Presley wouldn’t have heard that through the phone, but by the confused look on her face, she had. Fucking great.
“You owe me, man,” Jake says, though his tone is playful.
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll work all next week so you can go do whatever the hell it is you want to do.”
“Deal.”
“Want me to call someone to cover? I can hit up Tim; he mentioned he wants to help more.”
“I got it handled.”
“Thanks, Jake.”
“Tell Presley I hope she feels better.”
“Will do.” I hang up the phone and turn my attention to Presley, who still has her hand on my arm.
“You didn’t need to do that,” she says.
“It’s fine.”
“But you could come back and work.”
“Presley, relax. Let me take you home. ”
She pulls back her hand as if she’s been burned, the opposite of relaxing. God, this woman drives me nuts.
I don’t know what’s going through her mind, and I want to know what happened inside Night Hawk. So as I turn the key to start up my truck, an idea forms in my mind.
“You wanna have some fun, Presley?”
Her head snaps to me. “I’m sick, remember?” she snipes. A sly smile takes over my lips—I’m glad to see some of the fire peeking back through.
“Trust me.”
She crosses her arms over her chest and glares at me. Her body language tells me everything I need to know about how much she doesn’t trust me, which is fair.
I let out a long breath. “I know we don’t know each other well, and you probably don’t think I’m a good man, but I swear I would never hurt you.” I pause. “Unless you ask me to.”
When the words have finished echoing between us, I wonder if I’ve gone too far, revealed too much about myself with that add-on. But…
If it wasn’t quiet in my truck, I would’ve missed her sharp intake of breath. I keep my eyes on her, and she shifts as if—is she turned on by that?
Jesus, I need to stop that. No fucking Presley—she’s going through something. You’re going through something , a little voice in the back of my brain says, but I ignore it.
“Come on, Presley. It’s rare to get a night off around here, and you deserve to have a little fun. Everyone does. Just trust me, even if it’s only for one night.”
She stares at me, unblinking, which is different from her normal avoidance. I watch as her pupils contract, lips twitching as her brain works overtime to make her decision.
After another long pause, her shoulders relax, and she tips her chin. “Okay,” she mutters. “Just don’t take me to a bar.”
I smile, a true one this time. “Wasn’t planning on it.”