Chapter Four #2
“Don’t give me that.” I shot a sidelong glance at her.
We hadn’t slept together again since Saturday, but I’d gone to the health department Monday like I promised.
The results declaring me clean had hit my inbox first thing this morning.
I’d forwarded them to her and gotten hers in return. “Not like we won’t again.”
Unless talking about Elizabeth showing up at my place pissed her off and put her off me.
She flicked a glance at me, curiosity all over her face. “Did you go bare with her?”
“I ask you about your last boyfriend?” I didn’t really want to know. I knew her last boyfriend. Hell, I played golf with Colt on occasion if neither of us had a partner for a round.
She tapped the bag with her foot. “Uh, he was always suited up.”
I rubbed a hand over my neck. “We were together a long time, and she was on birth control. Yeah, I went bare.”
After a long moment, she wrinkled her nose. “So that’s better?”
Slowing to turn onto 37, I cut a sideways look at her. She wasn’t looking at me, playing with the outside seam on her jeans. How the fuck did I navigate this without being an asshole?
“We . . . me and Elizabeth . . . were kind of mediocre. Don’t think she liked it a whole lot with me.” I cleared my throat, clenching the wheel. “It’s different with you. Hotter.”
“Because it’s new.”
“No.” I exhaled. “It’s us. Look, I don’t mind talking about my relationship with her. But talking about our sex life? Makes me feel sketchy.”
The little smirk that made me want to kiss her played about her lips. “Look at you, being an honorable man. I like it.”
My ears heated up like when Daddy or Grandaddy told me I did good. “You want me any other way?”
A pause hung between us. “No.”
With that soft admission, a satisfied grin tugged at my mouth. And I didn’t have to say a word.
“Why would we need to talk about your relationship with her?”
I gripped the wheel, then deliberately relaxed my hands. “She was at the house when I got home.”
From the corner of my eye, I caught the way her left eyebrow winged upward.
“I shut the door in her face. She’s pissed.”
“And when she gets mad, she gets ugly.”
“Yep.” Again, I didn’t recognize the person Elizabeth had become. She’d not been that way at the beginning. Self-centered and immature? Sure. We’d been kids. But she hadn’t been mean. “Don’t want her coming at you.”
Tyler gave a soft snort.
I frowned. “What?”
“I’m not worried about her.”
I flexed my fingers again. “That channel . . . she’s got a lot of followers. She turned them against her sister.”
“I’m not worried about her finding me on social media.” Tyler shrugged, an easy roll of her shoulders. “I blocked her from everything a long time ago.”
Confused, I frowned. Did they know each other?
“She’s not the kind of woman I want with any insight into my life.” Tyler didn’t look at me, staring straight ahead. “It’s a small town. I’m careful with my social media.”
Relief washed through me. “Good.”
“Has she turned on you yet?”
I waffled a hand between us. “Kinda. Implied I was cheating with her sister.”
With a small huff, Tyler folded her arms. “Spiteful bitch.”
Even if I agreed, I wasn’t supposed to say it. Look at Tate with Hannah. “Her behavior is wrong.”
“Her behavior is reprehensible.”
“That, too. Anyway . . .” I wanted to move us along. And I didn’t want Elizabeth here anymore than I did Colt. “Thought it best if I told you I blocked her, too.”
She nodded, gaze still on the road. The silence bugged me, worming under my skin. What was she thinking? Maybe weighing if I was worth risk of Elizabeth.
“Thank you for being upfront with me.” Her voice was soft.
This time, the relief crashed through me. I reached for her hand, squeezing her fingers with mine.
The rest of the way to Sale City, a comfortable silence lingered around us.
I reluctantly released her hand to get us parked downtown.
The small town storefronts, empty for years, sported layers of dust on the glass, but BB’s was good eating, and people drove from all over on Friday and Saturday nights.
I jogged around the hood to open her door, only to find a small scowl twisting her face. “You brought me here so people don’t see us and it gets back to her.”
“What?” With a scoff, I leaned in to drop a kiss on the stern line of her mouth. “No. I brought you here because the food is amazing.”
She cast a cynical glance around us.
I tugged her out of the truck and pointed her toward the restaurant. Hands at her hips, I guided her ahead of me, our boots scraping on the asphalt. Her expression didn’t clear.
“Trust me,” I murmured near her ear, a shudder moving through her under my easy grasp, and smiled at the shiver. We fired hot and all I had to do was get close to her.
Everything between us was good. The idea of us was early still, although Grandaddy had convinced Grandma to elope after two weeks, scandalizing the entirety of Chandler County, and she was complicated.
Well, not really.
She needed security and honesty and transparency. Who didn’t? And I could give her those things.
She was honest, too, although something more than Colt had sparked those needs. These weren’t the response to a bad relationship, planted during a season and easily uprooted. No, these were deep-rooted, grown over a lifetime.
I thought about asking, because I wanted to know everything about her, but she’d tell me when she was ready.
I’d called ahead and asked River to hold us a table, so we were seated quickly. And if she’d thought we wouldn’t run into anybody I knew over here, she was sadly mistaken. More than half the patrons hailed from Coney, and I’d had to stop and speak several times on the way to our booth.
Like I’d promised her, the food was excellent, and I muffled a groan at the rich, buttery grits with crawfish. I waved my fork at her seafood platter. “You don’t eat crawfish?”
A visible shudder moved over her body, and she made a face, nose wrinkled in disgust. “I dissected them in biology in high school.”
“Yeah, that’s right. You’re from Thomasville.” We didn’t dissect anything when I went through school, just clicked through computerized scenarios. “Forget you didn’t go to Chandler-Haynes.”
“I did.” She shifted in her chair, her jaw tightening a moment before she relaxed. “For a little while.”
“Yeah?” I tried, but didn’t remember her. But that had been a decade ago, and I’d been stupid about Elizabeth back then.
“It wasn’t very long.” She laid her fork down, a sharp movement leaving the utensil perfectly aligned.
I wasn’t stupid – I was brushing up on something uncomfortable for her. I took an invisible step back. “It’s okay. I can’t eat fish roe. It weirds me out.”
She wrinkled her nose again. “We dissected perch, too. I get it.”
Laying my forearm on the table, I brushed my pinky along hers. “We have a lot in common.”
One brow rose in a dry look as she studied me. “You mean the sex is good.”
“I mean we’re good. Stop trying to reduce what we’re becoming to something basic.”
She pursed her lips, a clear sign of annoyance and an action that only made me want to kiss her, but didn’t argue. I counted that as a win.
While we finished eating, we stayed away from anything else emotional, like what we might be or my ex or hers.
She talked about her best and worst customers of the week, and I shared about trying to fix a hydraulic leak while I was knee-deep in mud.
On the way home, she touched my arm, tracing the muscles under my shirtsleeve, stroking my shoulder before running a teasing fingertip along my neck.
By the time I pulled into her drive, the subtle foreplay had my dick pulsing against my zipper.
Shifting to park, I sucked in a breath, my belly hollow and heavy all at the same time.
I turned to look at her, those pretty hazel eyes glittering in the dim light cast from her front porch.
She followed my collar, brushing the skin at the base of my throat, then flicked a glance at the CVS bag between us.
“So are you coming in?”
“You want me to?”
Her sultry laugh hung between us. “Don’t play dumb, flyboy. I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”
Killing the ignition, I slung the door open and came around the hood. She already had her door open, and I caught her chin in my palm, holding her gaze under mine. “What did I tell you about that door?”
With a smirk, she planted her hand on my chest and pushed. “And I told you I didn’t need you opening my door.”
Intensely aware of that palm flattened between my pecs, I tilted my head. “Do you really want me to stop? I will.”
She flexed her fingers, sending sparks of sensation along my nerve endings. “Sometimes it feels weird waiting when I could just open it myself. It doesn’t . . . annoy . . . me as much when it’s you the way it did with Colt.”
One corner of my mouth quirked. “Because I’m more special than he is.”
“More conceited, I think.”
With a laugh, I leaned in and kissed her, a hint of sweet tea clinging to her bottom lip. “Grab the condoms.”
“You’re awful confident.” She hopped down, and I rested my hands at her waist while she twisted around to grab the bag.
“Maybe because you’ve been revving me up since we left Sale City.”
She gave me a little shove toward the walkway leading to the front porch. “Well, let’s go then, flyboy.”
My Lord, this woman. She wasn’t shy about what we were going to do, about what she wanted, and I liked that.
Didn’t feel like I was fumbling around in the dark, trying to figure something out without a flashlight or schematics.
Everything had just been so damned bad with Elizabeth toward the end – well, a long time before the end, but it’d definitely gotten worse – and not just in the bedroom.
With Tyler, I simply had to listen, be honest, and be myself.
I followed her up the steps, transfixed by how she moved, the sway of her hips, the way her dark hair shone under the porch light. She was pretty and graceful and tough all at the same time, and I’d follow her anywhere. Unlocking the door, she stepped inside, already undoing buttons on her blouse.
“Hey.” I nudged the door shut and twisted the lock. “I’d like to do that.”
“Too late.” She shrugged out of the shirt and caught it in one hand, sashaying through the door to the left of the little foyer.
Okay, so we were going straight for it again, just like at my house. Once more, I followed, boots sinking into thick beige carpet.
A dark cherry fourposter with matching nightstands and a dresser dominated the square room. I stood in the doorway, watching while she tossed a slew of small pillows into a corner. Never understood those things. What purpose did they serve?
She flipped the dusty rose comforter back to reveal ivory sheets edged with a hint of lace. Wasn’t that itchy?
And I didn’t know how I felt about this matter-of-fact behavior right now. I mean, going straight for it had been fine that first night, when we’d been just a hookup. But we were . . . well, I thought we were working at something more.
Here I was with a pretty, graceful, sexy-as-hell woman ready to go to bed with me, and I was balking because she was going too fast?
Maybe all I needed was to slow us down a little.
Stripping my own shirt over my head, I toed off my boots and peeled off my socks. She turned, leaning against the bed to watch me while she pulled off her boots. Her gaze dipped over me, from my shoulders to my chest to my abs then to my zipper, the fact I was hard obvious.
I popped the button on my jeans but left the zipper while I closed the distance between us in a few strides.
Fanning her hands over my chest, she looked up at me, gauging my expression while she touched me, following the lines of my muscles with firm caresses.
Sensation zinged out along my nerve endings.
One hand at her hip, I trailed a gentle finger down her spine. She tensed under the touch. Shifting that hand so I cradled her hips in both palms, I lowered my head and brushed a soft kiss over her shoulder. Her body went taut in my easy hold.
“What’s wrong?” I rested my nose on her shoulder, then lifted my head to meet her gaze. “We don’t have to.”
She stood tense in my loose embrace, an unhappy slant to her mouth. “This is . . . intimacy is hard for me.”
I paused. Intimacy. Not sex. Her word choice stood out as an admission we were becoming something.
Continuing to hold her loosely, I turned the thought over.
Me and Elizabeth had been just sex for a long time.
Maybe we’d always been just sex physically – she wasn’t into it, no matter what I did to make it good, and she indulged only to placate me or get her way.
I’d needed the distance, and maybe the authenticity that was Tyler, to see that.
With a flex of my hands, I drew her a half-inch or so closer to me. “I might be learning about that, too.”
She scoffed. “You were engaged.”
“Yeah, but . . . I’m seeing we weren’t real.” Dipping my head, I brushed my nose over her ear and smiled at the palpable frisson running through her body. “And seeing you and me might be.”
Her brows tugged together in a fierce frown. “I’m not easy.”
I shrugged. “That’s okay.”
“You say that now.”
“Listen.” I slid a fingertip along the soft skin above her jeans. “I spend my days taking stuff apart, running down problems and fixing them. I don’t need easy.”
“I don’t need fixing.” A thread of ice entered her tone. Yeah, I’d brushed up on something bruised and hurting there.
“No, and you don’t need me to take you apart and run down your problems. Think you need me to support you, maybe hold you steady sometimes. Like a motor mount.”
Her small laugh exploded as a tiny snort. “A motor mount.”
“Yeah. I figure Colt Calvert didn’t make a good one because he’s a little broken, so you felt unsteady, off center, no matter how much you cared about him.”
Her lips parted, understanding dawning in her eyes.
I chuckled. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
With one finger, I tickled her waist, and she smacked my hand aside. “Stop.”
Laughing, I cradled her face in both hands. “Let me make love to you. See how it goes.”
She stilled, eyeing me.
I winked. “You might like it.”
Several moments dragged out, with her studying my face like some old complicated riddle she didn’t quite understand. Her chin lifted, the barest hint of a tilt, and she tiptoed up, pressing her mouth to mine. She linked her arms about my neck.
Cupping the back of her head, I deepened the kiss, teasing, tasting. She was giving me something here, trusting me.
And I had to make this good.