Page 30 of Roadrunner

He was leaning against the counter when I came in, arms crossed, wearing the look he got when he wasn’t planning to behave. He’d let his beard grow in a little. My favorite version of him. He had on the same jeans and boots he always wore, and somehow it still worked.

“What are you doing?” I asked, and let myself look at him longer than I needed to.

His eyes moved over me slowly. A low sound came from somewhere in his chest, not quite a growl.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I said, without much conviction.

He didn’t stop.

I held my dirty plate against my chest like it might protect me from something.

“I’m about done with this waiting thing,” he said.

“Same.”

He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “I mean it.”

“Me too.”

His finger traced along my jaw, down my neck, to my shoulder. He had a way of being romantic that no one would call romantic on paper. It worked on me anyway. I glanced over my shoulder. Della was clearing the table, Antonio and Addy talking near the window. Then back at him, and I felt the whole length of my body agree with whatever he was thinking.

I set my dishes in the sink harder than I needed to. “You drive me crazy.”

He came up behind me, hands settling on my waist, his mouth close to my ear. “You make my cock hard. Just being here.” Each word landed warm against the back of my neck. Goosebumps rose along my arms.

“Stop it,” I said, meaning the opposite. I tipped my head against his jaw. “Your mother’s going to walk in.”

“I don’t care.”

I turned around. He put a hand on the counter on either side of me, boxing me in. The smell of him. Cedar, engine oil, something underneath that was just him. It did more to undo me than anything he’d said.

“Your mother is going to walk in,” I said again, mostly to hear myself say something.

She did, right on cue, an armload of dishes in her hands. She took one look at us and stopped. “What are you two lovebirds doing?”

“He’s got me cornered,” I said.

“Arturo Panzolini. Stop teasing her.”

He stepped back, and she handed the moment off without missing a beat. “Make yourself useful and get the cobbler out of the oven. It should still be warm.”

I straightened my shirt and tried to look like a person who hadn’t just been thirty seconds from disaster in someone’s mother’s kitchen.

“I made your favorite, dear,” Della said over her shoulder.

I already knew. The smell had been in the house since we arrived. Even peach cobbler couldn’t fully compete for my attention that afternoon.

“Peach cobbler?” I managed.

“Special day, special food.” She opened the freezer and started digging through it. “Oh, no.” She straightened up, hands on her hips. “There’s no ice cream. I would have sworn—”

“We don’t need ice cream,” Riley said. “It’s good without it.”

For once in my life I didn’t care about ice cream one way or another. Ten minutes alone with Riley in the Jeep, on the other hand, I cared about very much. “It’s not the same,” I said.

“She’s right,” Della admitted. “It’s not the same without it.”

We’d taken my Jeep that day, thanks to a downpour that had flooded half of Antonio’s driveway. An ice cream run, alone, in a car with no witnesses, was suddenly the most appealing errand of my life.