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Ouch. That bluntness of hers hurt when it wasn’t saying what he wanted to hear. “You didn’t want to see me?”
“I always want to see you, Levi.” She sighed, slipping her fingers free of his and placing both underneath her thighs. “That isn’t the problem.”
Which meant there was a problem. Hadn’t they already gone through this? Hadn’t he already agreed not to see other women? Not to break dates with text messages? What more did she want?
“Then what is the problem?”
She didn’t answer him at first and he thought maybe she didn’t plan to, but then that bluntness kicked in again.
“The direction my thoughts take after I see you.”
Had his jeans just grown tighter?
“I think I’d like to hear more about that direction.”
She snorted. “I’m sure you would.”
He laughed, shifting in the driver’s seat. Yep, his jeans had definitely shrunk a size or two…or twenty. “But I’m not going to?”
She shook her head. “Not tonight.”
But he would. Eventually. He wouldn’t push her. He wanted to make love to her, but he’d continue to
pace himself, to savor each moment in her company, to prove he was a better man than Jonathan Fielding.
Levi pulled his sports utility vehicle up onto the grassy area where he’d parked the previous day while they’d fished. An area where he had spent many an hour during his childhood. “You’re a hard woman, Madison,” he teased.
She made no move to get out of the truck and neither did he.
“Not really,” she denied softly. “I’ve been trying to be tough, but the truth is that most of my life I’ve been too soft and paid the price.”
Levi sat with his hands on the steering-wheel, sat studying the rigid lines to Madison’s vulnerable face.
“You’re referring to men?” He didn’t really want to know, but he did. He wanted to know everything about Madison. Inside and out and all in between.
“Mostly.”
Mostly. Levi let that digest. “Was there someone special?”
“Once upon a time. Unfortunately, he turned out not to be so special. It just took me a lot longer to realize that than it should have.”
“His loss,” Levi said, and meant it.
Any man who’d had Madison’s attention and lost it had to have been a fool, an idiot, a man who hadn’t known or appreciated what he’d had.
Levi ran his palms over the smooth leather cover of the steering-wheel, absorbing his thoughts. So he believed any man who’d had Madison and let her go was a fool? What exactly did that mean?
Madison stared out the passenger window but didn’t really register anything other than the blur of the lake beyond where they’d parked.
She didn’t want to discuss Simon a moment longer. How had they gotten onto the topic to begin with?
Neither did she want to discuss how she’d tried to be tough, tried to be a player, only to end up having to admit to herself that she was no player and never would be. She had too much heart for that apparently. So much heart that she gave it to the wrong men time and again.
She snuck a glance at Levi.
Was he the wrong man?
He felt so right.
