My touch is brief—nothing like the way I want to touch her—but I hear her quick intake of breath. Even with the music playing, I hear it.
I look over at her to see her eyes wide, looking at the spot where I touched her.
When I clear my throat, her gaze jerks to my face. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have?—”
She cuts me off. “No. It’s okay. I didn’t …” But she doesn’t seem to know how to finish the thought, and her words just trail off as she shifts to adjust the fabric. Then she flashes me a smile that’s a smidge overly bright, like she’s trying badly to hide her nerves. “That’s just one of many.”
Are those anxious nerves or aware nerves? Traffic is sparse, and I have the luxuryof studying her in quick glances. Her cheeks are pink as she licks her lips before rolling them in as if she’s trying to bite back her smile.
Aware nerves then. Good.
“One of many tattoos?” I ask, turning my focus back to the road.
“One of many dragon tattoos.” She gives a huff of laughter. “Well, notmany. One of three. But all my tattoos are of dragons.”
“Which proves my point.”
“I suppose so.” Her fingers inch up the fabric to reveal a little more of the golden dragon. “This one is Ramoth, Lessa’s dragon from Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books.”
I’m familiar with the series, but I’ve never read them. I make a mental note to download them to my Kindle tonight before asking, “And the other two?”
“Eustace Scrubb fromThe Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Toothless fromHow to Train Your Dragon.”
“Okay, even I know Toothless. But Eustace Scrubb? How is that a proper dragon name?”
She laughs, but then adds, in a stiff voice like she’s quoting something. “‘There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.’”
“I thought you said he was a dragon.”
She gives a gasp of mock outrage. “Have you never read The Chronicles of Narnia?”
I shrug, feeling weirdly self-conscious. “I didn’t read much as a kid.”
The look she slants in my direction is both serious and suspicious. “But you do read now, right?”
“I didn’t say I couldn’t read. I just said I didn’t read much as a kid. But, yes, I do read now. I picked it up when I was in the navy. I needed something to do besides exercise during all that downtime.”
“Okay, good.” She nods in obvious approval. “I don’t know if we could be friends if you weren’t a reader.”
“If that’s a dealbreaker, shouldn’t it have come up before now?”
“Dude, you’re smart! I just assumed!”
Thank God we didn’t meet in high school. Pretty sure she would have run away from the relentless little shit I was. Sure, I was smart, but definitely not smart enough to have impressed her.
Scratching my nails down the back of my hair, I shift the conversation away from my checkered past. “So tell me about this Scrubb kid who is also a dragon.”
Instead of just telling me about just this one kid, she launches into a detailed description of the entireseries of books, only getting to the kid—an obnoxious little shit who gets turned into a dragon—after several minutes.
And somewhere in the middle of it, I stop hearing the individual words.
Not because I’m not paying attention. Hell, it’s the opposite.
I’m paying too much attention.
To her.
To the way her voice shifts when she gets excited—faster, brighter, like it can’t quite keep up with her thoughts. To the way her hands move as she talks, sketching invisible shapes in the air, like she’s building the story in front of us. To the way her whole face lights up when she’s explaining something she loves.
