Page 95 of Slow Hands Cowboy

His tone was dry, and he was making light of it, but he wasn’t looking at her.

“Because I wanted you back then.”

“So you’ve said.”

“But I need you to understand, I wanted you back then, and I constructed this whole... awful mean girl thing because I wanted you. It was all you, Walker. I wasn’t scared of anybody else. I wasn’t scared of anybody else turning me into something that I didn’t recognize. I wasn’t afraid of anybody else making me into my mother. Only you. It was just you.”

“Am I supposed to be flattered by that?”

“I don’t know. You can choose to be flattered by it or not. I’m not going to say that it’s an exceptionally flattering thing. It’s just that... it just is. And I want to know who I am if I... if I didn’t do that. What would have happened if I had given in then?”

“We would have fucked, but I would have been the seventeen-year-old virgin version of myself, and the sex would have been terrible. And very fast. You probably still would have decided that sex wasn’t worth all that, and you never would have told anybody that we did it.”

She didn’t really like his characterization of that. Or her. But to be fair, particularly the teenage version of herself had not earned any better.

What other characterization did she deserve? There wasn’t one.

And she could know exactly why she had been that way, and she could feel sorry about it. But it had been her.

“I just wish that I had been braver. Because I feel like I made the people around me suffer for it.”

“Well, we all do that, don’t we?”

He hesitated for a moment. “I told Cody. About my dad. I figure since I told you it wasn’t really that fair to not tell my brother.”

“Oh. That’s good. I mean, do you feel good about it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know that I feel anything about it.”

“Well, that’s fair, too. But it seems like it was a secret that you were keeping for a long time.”

“I’m made of secrets,” he said, giving her that wicked grin that made her insides melt. Yes, Walker was made of secrets. Because he seemed like he wasn’t, and that made it all the more apparent that there were deep ones.

At least, that was what she was discovering. “It must have felt like a betrayal. Finding out that he wasn’t your dad. Even though you didn’t love him. Because like you said, you were trying so hard not to be him, and then...”

“Yeah. Then it turns out I did have a dad that I was more like. And I felt betrayed, because I hadn’t known what to look out for. So, if that’s what you’re getting at, yeah, you’re right. I was pissed off. Because I felt like I had worked hard to avoid that, and then in the end, there was no point. I think I might be like him. James Holland.”

“Why do you think that?”

“He’s a handsome devil who clearly uses his charm against people. I do that. I’m not bragging. But neither am I going to have any kind of false humility about the tools that I’ve used in life to get where I want to go. I used to be able to get away with shoplifting from the store, because nobody believed that I would do such a thing. They thought I was a cute little kid. I mean, eventually they figured it out, and then we got more of a reputation, us Grayson kids. It was obvious that you had to keep an eye on us in the stores. But everybody watched Cody closer than they did me. Not the little blonde kid that was stuffing candy bars into his underwear.”

“You didn’t.”

“Hell yeah, I did. People don’t check there. You put stuff in your pockets and you’re asking for trouble. I made one lady feel so bad that she had suspected me. Turned my pockets inside out. And the whole time I had a can of chicken soup in my underwear.”

“How did you manage that?”

“Baggy pants, tighty whiteys. It worked. But I’m just saying, I have that. That natural ability to get what I want by lying. Not only that, I never felt bad about it. I figured we needed it, and everybody could kick rocks. They weren’t hungry. I was.”

“I mean, to an extent, I agree with you. Or maybe I’m just sorry you were ever put in that position. What else were you supposed to do? You were kids who were left to your own devices.”

“Maybe other kids would have done different things. But for me, that was easy, made the most sense. We also used to put out fake donation jars.”

“You probably could have put out real donation jars. You were in need.”

“Yeah, we experimented with a few things. Found out you could make more money asking for money for cats and dogs than you could asking for money for people.”

“Why?”