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He scowled at me. “This isn’t about me getting you off, but do you want to say that a little louder? I don’t think the guys in the back heard you.”
I whipped my head around to spot one of the utility guys suddenly finding his cell phone very interesting. I growled a curse. “I hate you so much.”
“I know. Now, get in your car. I’m not letting you—”
“Why? Tell me why you’re doing this. Why are you insisting on taking care of me like I’m a child?”
“Because you need a place to stay, and I highly doubt you want to pay three hundred bucks a night to stay in a room with shitty sheets and more than likely semen on the walls, but hey…” He opened his back door. “You really want to? Fine. Go. But I don’t want to hear shit from you this week that you’re tired or don’t feel well because you were forced to stay in a Motel 6 or wherever the hell you’ll end up, when I have a perfectly suitable guest room.” When I didn’t reach for my bags again, he slammed the door shut, his nostrils flaring. “One of these days, you’ll get it through your thick head that you don’t have to do everything on your own.”
“One of these days, maybe you’ll learn to ask instead of steamrolling.”
He crowded me, momentarily blocking out the gray sky behind him. “But you take direction from me so well, don’t you? You like to fight, but you alsowantto give in.”
Heat pooled low in my belly at his words, and I shoved him away, stalking away from him with as much dignity as I could muster. Because he was exactly right. I loved fighting with him, and I thought I loved giving in to him even more. Worse yet, I loved how he didn’t give up on me, didn’t take no for an answer when the rest of the world did.
Like the sex-crazed idiot I was, I tailed behind Dean’s Toyota to his place off Sharpless Street. It was a brick townhouse with a small porch that appeared to have an original wood railing and arches under the roof. With the wicker chairs and American flag hanging, it was…quaint. Like something straight out of the 1900s. He opened the door for me, and I stepped into the living room.
As I explored the decorative sconces and touched the black leather chair, he explained, “I bought it a few years ago, and it was really run-down. Took me a long time, but I renovated everything myself.”
“You did? How?”
With his hands in his pockets, he shrugged. “You can learn how to do almost anything from YouTube.”
“Wow,” I said, impressed. “Looks great.”
“Thanks.” He hung up my coat in the small hall closet. “You want the grand tour?” At my nod, he led me through the tiny dining room and into the galley kitchen, which had white cabinets and a marble countertop on either side. He pointed through the panes of the black-painted back door, which led to a small mudroom then out to the backyard. “Not much to look at out there, but I’ll get around to it once it warms up.”
Rounding back to the front of the house, we walked up the creaky steps to the second floor. “My room,” he said, gesturing directly to the right of the staircase. Then to the first door on the left. “Office.”
I poked my head into the room with gray walls, a big desk, bookcase with a few collections of hardbacks and some framed photos. Without asking permission, I crossed to pick up one of the pictures. It was of a bunch of boys—maybe seventeen or eighteen years old—in school uniforms, all of them with shaggy hair, untucked shirts, and big smiles. “These your friends?”
Coming up behind me, he wrapped his arm around my side to point to each of the boys. “That’s Gabe, me, Patrick, Hank, and Ethan.”
“You all look the same,” I said then dragged my index finger over Patrick, the boy with bleach blonde hair hanging in his eyes. He was a few inches shorter than the rest, so his arms were up over his friends’ shoulders. “You miss him this weekend?”
I felt Dean nod next to me.
“I figured those couple of shots you all took were for him.”
“Yeah,” he said, and a coil of melancholy unfurled in my stomach.
“It never gets easier, huh?” I set the picture back down. “Sometimes I wake up feeling…not quite right. Like I forgot something, but I go about my day, only to suddenly feel this wave and…” I inhaled deeply as I faced Dean with his hands tucked into his pockets, his head close to mine.
“And it hits you all over again,” he finished for me.
I stared into his eyes that were lighter in this sun-soaked office, and sometimes I swore he could see right into me. See right through me, for the fraud that I was. I wasn’t the tough, badass woman I portrayed. I was a sad little girl trying to keep everyone from noticing how hurt I was by mean-mugging the world into submission. But this one man never fell for it. Never let me forget I wasn’t alone. Especially in this, in grief.
And the common thread between us was so real, I swear I could have pulled on it. Maybe I did without even realizing because he closed the inches between us, dropping his mouth to mine, his kiss unhurried, his lips soft and inviting. Too inviting.
When he teased his tongue along my lower lip, I jerked away from him. “We have to stop this.”
He scrubbed his hands over his hair and face then propped them on his hips. “Why?”
“Because.”
“Because isn’t an argument.”
“Because we don’t like each other. Because we work together. Because we’re fighting for the same promotion. Because how many more reasons do you need?”
