I didn’t have a response to that.
I didn’t need protecting. I paid my own bills and hadn’t depended on anyone but myself since my father passed away and I’d stepped up to help my mother with my brothers. I didn’t do damsel in distress. I did extra shifts and double-knotted my own bootstraps.
“Last night was your lucky night. Your Prince Charming seems to have shown up.”
I snorted. “Prince Charming? Griffin? The man comes in scouting the building for snipers, not looking for a glass slipper.”
Maggie nudged me, chuckling. “Honey, that man looked ready to put the guy through the wall for touching you.”
The thing was, she wasn’t wrong. I’d watched it happen. Griffin hadn’t moved like a man doing a good deed. He’d moved like a man protecting what was his. “What? No. He’s just, uh, intense.”
He was like a lot of men in Lone Mountain. Broody loners who kept to themselves. So much so, some of us had started calling it Broody Mountain as a joke.
“Kettle, let me introduce you to pot.” Maggie smiled at me.
I wasn’t sure if intense was the best way to describe me. More like exhausted. But then so was my mother. My father had died a few years ago, when I was a senior in high school. My younger, twin brothers had been a surprise baby that had turned into two. Now they were mischief making first graders that I absolutely adored. “I’m helping my mom raise my younger brothers. She works two jobs, but it’s still not enough. And I’m trying to finish my classes for nursing school on top of it all.”
“You’re carrying the weight of the world.” Her voice and face were filled with sympathy.
“It’s not that bad,” I said, forcing a smile. “Just a lot of late nights and early mornings.”
“And no time for dating?” Maggie voice was serious.
I laughed, shaking my head. “Absolutely no time for dating. And even if I did, what kind of guy wants to take on all that?”
Maggie’s smile widened. “Maybe one who thinks the prize is worth the price.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Because the idea ofhimwanting someone like me was too ridiculous to even entertain. He wasthirty-five. I was twenty-three. Twelve years older than me. He’d lived a whole life I knew nothing about—war, loss, things that left marks you could see and probably a hundred more you couldn’t.
He wasn’t a boy trying to figure himself out. He was already forged. Already decided. There was something about that I couldn’t quite talk myself out of finding devastatingly attractive. The only thing we had in common was that we both liked the battery acid tasting coffee at the diner.
But she wasn’t wrong. There had been something different about the way he’d reacted, the way he stepped in without hesitation. And the way he looked for me every time he came in.
When we were almost done, Maggie grabbed her coat and keys. “I’m heading out. Ed’s waiting up. You sure you’re okay finishing the floors?”
“Go. I’ve got this.”
She smiled at me. “We both know you’re stalling. Just in case.”
I knew what she meant. Just in case he as he coming.
Once Maggie left, the diner felt too big and too quiet. I locked the door and started mopping. I remembered his words from yesterday. Had he been trying to crack a joke, or had he really not wanted me to have to mop the floor.
I mopped the same section of floor twice without noticing. I was thinking about his hands. About the way he’d held my wrist. Rubbing his thumb across my pulse. I was thinking about what those hands would feel like with intent behind them instead of restraint. The thought settled low in my belly and stayed there, warm and inconvenient, and I told myself it was the late hour and the long shift and the fact that I hadn’t slept enough.
I was lying.
I smiled as I finished closing up. As I was about to grab my keys and head home, there was a knock at the door.
I swung around, startled, expecting to see the group of guys, wanting in for something at the last minute.
Instead, it was him. Griffin.
He wasn’t in the black dress pants he’d worn last night. He was dressed in his regular clothing. A black t-shirt that hugged the massive breadth of his shoulders and the hard planes of his frame. A pair of jeans that fit his body so well, I had a sudden, wicked urge to yank them off with my teeth and see what was underneath.
I’d been having a lot of those fantasies staring the broody mountain man. And while it should have scared me, it didn’t.
I might be a virgin, but I had a very active imagination.
