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He shifted beside her. The buckle scraped over Formica.
“Mazzara? Is he the one who—”
“Bye, Mom.”
Amber hung up the phone and closed her eyes. Inhale, exhale, inhale, gosh darn it, she hoped he hadn’t heard that.
But she wasn’t any good at lying, even to herself. She worked the phone all the time, and she knew perfectly well that the volume stayed cranked up loud enough that it was possible to hear both sides of any conversation from several feet away. Rosalie
was a little hearing impaired.
He wasn’t several feet away. He was breathing. Right next to her.
He cleared his throat.
She turned.
“Basement?”
She beamed as if she were offering him a cocktail. Because she was excellent with men. So very excellent and savvy. Not at all a flushing, bumbling Bible college graduate who’d lost the faith and misplaced her virginity but somehow accidentally managed to hang on to her air of dewy inexperience.
It was her face—her giant eyes and big round cheeks. She looked like Bambi. The kind of men who were attracted to her wanted her to be as sweet and innocent as her face.
“I’m not Patrick.”
Amber blinked. I’m not Patrick was the last thing she’d expected him to say. Though to be fair, she was hard-pressed to come up with a list of things he might reasonably have said.
I adore you, Amber.
I want to marry you.
Or maybe, I want to take you out to my truck and teach you what sex is supposed to feel like.
She wasn’t innocent enough to think it would be romantic if he said any of those things. Not at all. It would be creepy. And probably also terrifying.
“Patrick’s my brother,” he added. “My name’s Tony.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s all right. People get us confused a lot.”
Patrick had to be the tattooed guy, then. The shorter brother, who didn’t do as much of the work or the bossing around.
Patrick the troublemaker.
Maybe Tony was the nice one.
Though if he’d looked like the nice one, she certainly wouldn’t have developed such a desperate, inadvisable crush on him. No, she liked his rough edges. The way his hair stuck out underneath his hard hat and clung to the back of his neck, a few weeks overdue for a visit with the scissors. The way his hands always looked so beat up when he held the door open for her—a dark blood blister under his thumbnail, a crack in one knuckle.
A man who worked hard, knew what he wanted, and didn’t take flak from anybody.
“I live over in Mount Pleasant,” he said. “Sunnybrook Lane.”
She flapped one hand and made a dismissive shape with her mouth, as if to say, No, no. Though what she was denying, she couldn’t say. That she’d wanted to know where he lived? That she minded going into basements with strange men?
She did mind. Or she would, normally. It was just that the tornado siren had short-circuited her brain.
And also, his voice was rich and dark and delicious. He wasn’t a big talker, and maybe that was because his voice was such a valuable substance, he had to ration it. She might actually be able to live on it for the next week.
