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“It’s yours.”
“I’ve had enough already. I’ll just throw it away.”
That was all the convincing she required. May reached for the taco, loaded it up with condiments, and dug in.
Ben leaned back in his chair and watched her eat. The last bite sent a cascade of steak juice between her fingers, and she licked it off with relish, finally full enough to say goodbye to the tacos with something approaching contentment.
She smiled at him, steeped in taco bliss.
“I love a woman who eats,” he said. And he smiled back.
A real grin—big, unrestrained, kind of goofy. His incisors were crooked, his whole smile just a little unbalanced. No expensive orthodontia for Ben.
But his teeth were white, and hiding behind that three-day stubble was a pair of creases too deeply carved to be considered dimples. They were more like crevasses. Geological features in the landscape of his craggy face.
Oh crud. His craggy handsome face.
Ben had a long, straight nose and those Slavic-looking eyes, hooded and expressive. He had dimples and nice teeth and shoulders that hinted at an excellent view beneath that hoodie. Had she really not noticed before? Was she blind?
“You want a Popsicle?” he asked.
Something inside of May tripped and landed hard on its ass.
“Sure,” she said. “I’d love one.”
CHAPTER FIVE
She went to town on the Popsicle.
The woman could eat. On a good bite, her eyelashes fluttered like she just might moan, but she was too polite. The last time Ben had met a woman he liked to watch eating this much, he’d married her.
And look how that turned out
.
His leg jittered under the table. He was grateful for the Spanish ballad that came on the radio for being so terrible that it provided a distraction.
“This song sucks,” he said.
“You think?” She drew the top four inches of the Popsicle into her mouth, her cheeks hollowing.
Ben looked away. Then back at her.
He couldn’t stop looking.
“So,” he said. She turned her Popsicle upside down and sucked juice from the bottom. “You have somewhere other than Dan’s you can sleep tonight?”
She stiffened. Her eyes jumped to his, then past him to the closed door of the restaurant.
A nicer man wouldn’t find that so entertaining, but he liked keeping her on her toes. She relaxed over whiskey, then flipped out when he asked her to dinner. Started to mellow on the walk, then went all deer-in-the-headlights at the mere mention of where she would sleep.
Probably his fault for making that crack about the cop wanting to get in her pants, but legs like that would get any man’s attention. And while the jersey she wore left everything to the imagination, Ben had a pretty good imagination.
He wasn’t trying to get her into bed, though. That would foul up the whole situation. Turn it into some kind of crass exchange, rather than what it was, which was …
Damn. Which was a completely self-centered experiment in humanitarianism, performed for the purpose of discovering whether he had it in him to be not-a-dickhead for a few consecutive hours.
Crass didn’t begin to describe it.
