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He stepped back a few inches and zipped her up, then offered her his hand. She wasn’t sure what to do with it, but when she took it, all he did was squeeze her fingers. “Let’s go inside.”
Chapter Seven
Ten minutes since he had his hand in her pants, and she wouldn’t look at him.
Tony helped her into the truck, wishing she would meet his eyes and knowing he might not like what he saw there if she did.
Amber fiddled with her seat belt. He gave up and walked around the truck. Climbed in and started the engine.
“You know where you’re going?” she asked.
“Yeah, I think so. Just let me know if I head the wrong way.”
He turned left and drove along the playing fields at the edge of the Camelot College campus.
A too-pretty town, it hardly seemed real to him. Not that Mount Pleasant was a cesspool—it had brick streets downtown, festivals in the summer, and quaint, old-fashioned businesses. But it also had a long commercial strip with one of every chain store, and neighborhoods full of ugly duplexes.
Camelot didn’t have any of that. It was a college town, full of liberal professors and spoiled rich kids whose parents could afford to spend more than forty thousand dollars a year educating them.
Tony wondered where Amber fit in all that, growing up at the apartment complex. She’d have gone to elementary school in Camelot, but they bused the Camelot kids into Mount Pleasant for middle school and high school. Then she would have driven into town for her college classes at the Naz.
She wasn’t quite from either place, maybe. Somewhere in between.
Her fingers kept plucking at the knee of her pants, as if it were vitally important for the wet fabric not to touch her leg.
Spooked again. He wondered if she was half as spooked as he was.
They’d gone their separate ways inside the building, Tony checking out the site while Amber moved through all the rooms and made sure everything had come through the storm okay. Then he’d offered her a ride.
He almost wished he hadn’t, though he would have been a total dick to leave her there by herself.
It was just that she looked too good in his truck.
He drove almost all the way out to the two-lane state highway that connected Camelot to Mount Pleasant, then hung a right and headed uphill toward the apartment complex. Amber shivered.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
She didn’t offer any more conversation, and he wasn’t sure what to say. He turned on the heat, angling the vents in her direction. The dashboard clock read six forty-five. Ninety minutes since the tornado siren had sent him into the basement with her.
Ninety minutes since he’d first said more than three words to her. So how had he ended up practically nailing her up against a tree, in public, where anybody could have seen them? What the fuck was wrong with him?
He was hot for her, sure. That kiss had been off the charts. Her body, her tongue, her breasts … just thinking about it made his balls ache and his dick get heavy all over again.
But he’d been reckless, and reckless was no good. Bad things happened when you started thinking the rules didn’t apply to you. He and Patrick used to think that, and Patrick had ended up in prison for it. Patrick had ended up destroyed by it.
It could just as easily have been Tony.
Somebody had told her he was trouble. He wished whoever it was had told her the rest of the story. He was starting to think he was going to have to.
At the entrance to the complex, he slowed down.
“Second building on the right,” she said.
He pulled into a space out front and cut the engine. She turned toward him, her eyes deep and liquid dark, full of an emotion he couldn’t identify. Something in them made him want to wrap his arm over her shoulder, but he knew where that would lead.
She’d never even had an orgasm with a man, and he wanted to hand her her first one. Of course he did. He was hard-wired to want that. Spread his seed, perpetuate the species. But what did that leave Amber with? Memories of getting off with some hard-hat-wearing roughneck who tumbled her around for a few hours and then never called her again?
