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Shane tightens his arm around me and says, “I can’t wait. I’m pretty proud of her.”
Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I think he might actually mean it. It’s not until we leave the rest of the guests to Josie’s questionable mercy that I realize Izzy will be there with us next Sunday. We’ll have to tell her something.
I say as much to Shane in the car. He taps on the wheel, then says, “Let’s tell her tomorrow, Ruthie. Maybe we can bring her out for breakfast after we pick her up from Danny’s. She deserves to know what’s going on.”
A feather could have tipped me over. “You think we’re going over there together? I figured…”
He gives me a sidelong look accompanied by a smile. “I hope so. It would be pretty rude of you not to invite me after I spend all night making you come.”
Laughter spurts out of me, but that’s not to say I’m not turned on.
“You sure know how to stroke a man’s ego, Ruthie,” he says.
“You don’t need the help. You do plenty of stroking of your own.”
He darts a quick glance at me. “Maybe so, but it feels different when someone else does it.”
Goddamn.
“Shane,” I say, my voice shaking. “If we go over there together, what will Danny think?”
He gives me another sidelong look, his eyes glittering in the low lighting from the streetlights and the moon. A full moon, which isn’t surprising, because the next words that come out of his mouth are definitely full moon words. “There’s something special between us, Ruthie. I want to explore it. I realize the marriage thing might fuck that up, but maybe it doesn’t have to. I feel like it would be a mistake for us not to figure this out.”
I don’t like the way he says “figure it out”—like I’m a problem he can solve and then be free of—but my heart feels like a fluttering bird in my chest. “So you want to tell him we’re…what, dating? And Izzy?”
Another sidelong look. “We can tell Izzy whatever you’d like. That’s your call. But if we’re going to try this, we need to be honest with Danny. It was a mistake to keep him in the dark before, and I try not to repeat my mistakes.”
“You fucked me again tonight,” I point out.
“And that wasn’t a mistake,” he says, sliding his hand onto my thigh—it feels so warm, I’m surprised it doesn’t burn a hand-sized hole right through my stockings.
I take a moment to think about the insanity of trying to date Shane Royce, when I’ve spent the past several years focusing on everything that’s wrong with him. When I know, deep down, that those issues still exist. He’s too driven, too ambitious, and for the wrong reasons. He’s emotionally closed-off. He’s…
He’s intense and too smart for his own good and has deep feelings.
He’s good with my daughter.
He makes me laugh and moan and feel and reach higher.
He’s Shane Fucking Royce.
He’s the boy whose initial I wrote on that bench; he’s the man who’s driven me crazy with need and also anger.
He’s my husband, hard as that is to believe.
“No,” I admit in a quiet voice. “It wasn’t.”
Still, even as the words come out, I hear Josie the Great telling me that I’m going to get married again.
This probably isn’t going to work out. But I have to try anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Shane
In the morning, I wake up with a jolt from a dream about Fred Myles, his withered face leering at me as he tells me that I’m nothing. He created me, and that which we create can just as easily be destroyed.
My heart is racing, but when I blink my eyes open, I realize a few things—Ruthie is next to me, wearing one of my long sleeve T-shirts because she gets cold at night. She’s the only woman who’s ever stayed over at my house, by design, but seeing her in my bed settles me instead of freaking me out.
