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“Oh, yeah.” I hadn’t thought about how the death of his sister would have affected Eric and how he might do things differently for others.
“Logan and Eric were right. It was a good thing that you did come and talk to them,” Brody said and looked at me.
His look was so intense that I almost took a step back. I wanted to say the look he was giving me, the heart-stopping intensity that was in his eyes, was because of his friends and their loss. But I knew it was something more, and with a shaky voice, I asked, “But?”
He smiled at me, and I almost forgot to breathe. How had I forgotten how good-looking he was, how unnerving his smiles were? I told myself he probably didn’t remember who I was, and he was only talking to me because his friends had told him to.
“A couple of things. Eric has been grieving the loss of his sister for over two years. He has gone through a lot of lows and very few highs. He was coming to accept the fact that Denton may never be caught or that he would never be able to prove that he did it.”
“Me coming and talking to you just gave him hope. Hope that you don’t think I should have given him,” I finished for Brody.
“Possibly, that remains to be seen.”
“Yet you have an issue with it.” I was starting to see that the issues he was having weren’t with me exactly but what I represented. It made me feel better about how he was reacting to me, but not completely.
“That remains to be seen,” he said.
“What is the other issue?” I asked.
I stood and looked at him, daring him to tell me that I was a part of his past and he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I wanted him to say that I was only using this as an excuse to get closer to him and it wasn’t going to work. He didn’t do any of those things.
He lifted his hand, and I turned to see a cab coming down the street towards us. I walked with him to the edge of the sidewalk and waited for the cab to show up. He didn’t answer my question. When the cab pulled up next to us, he opened the door. I thought he wasn’t going to answer me. It was what he had been doing all night; why would this be any different? I shook my head and moved into the cab.
The feeling of his hand on mine stopped me. I immediately felt a current running through me, and my eyes shot open to him as if I had been shocked. He was looking at our hands and then slowly looked up at me. He gave me a devilish smile as if he already knew that was how it was going to be when we touched.
I had never had such an intense feeling when I touched anyone ever. His look told me that he had not expected that reaction, but he welcomed it. Brody closed his hand around mine and gave it a slight squeeze. I took a shallow breath and felt as if his hand was touching my entire body, not just my hand. His eyes stayed locked on mine and then slowly lingered down my face and to my breasts. Neither of us spoke, and I waited for his eyes to fall back on mine. When they did, desire and need looked back at me.
“The other issue is: I want you, I have for as long as I can remember, and I have no idea what to do about it. Get home safe. We will talk again soon,” he said, released my hand, and stepped away from the cab.
I stood and stared at him for a few seconds. Of all the things I thought he was going to say, that wasn’t it. His comment left me poleaxed, and I could only stare at him dumbfounded as I moved inside the cab and drove away.
Chapter 5
Brody
“You say you want me, but you don’t know what to do about it?” Zoey asked as she stepped away from the cab and towards me.
I stammered, “Yes,” as she put her hands on my hips. She moved them so they were around my back and then to my ass, giving it a good squeeze.
“That’s too bad because I know exactly what I want to do with you.”
The dream, the idea, and my imagination had run through a thousand different ways the night could have gone, and all of them were with Zoey in my arms. It hadn’t happened, but it would eventually. Now that Zoey was back in my life, I wouldn’t let her go. I just needed to figure out how.
We had grown up together. Aurora, our hometown, was small enough that everyone knew everyone else, and I had always known about Zoey. Her family had moved to town when I was in junior high. We had ended up having the same math class; I wasn’t very good at it, she was, and I had immediately been infatuated with her. We had been friendly in class, and I thought we were friends and we were until we went into high school, and everything changed.
During the summer before our freshman year, she had started dating Adam McDermott. They had been inseparable, and she had cut me out of her life. It had hurt, but I had always thought that eventually, they would break up, and it would give me a chance to be with her. They did eventually break up, only to get back together again. I hoped that eventually, Zoey would see that Adam wasn’t the right guy for her, but she hadn’t. I had pushed any thoughts of her aside until she had come walking into my bar last night.
She had been shocked, to say the least, by my revelation. I couldn’t blame her; I had been too. I wasn’t one to be so bold, so blunt with a woman, but I wanted her to know what I was thinking, what I was feeling. I had wanted her to know for years, but I never had the chance. If it set her on edge a little bit, then so be it. She had done the same thing to me since she had walked into the bar.
I would see her again, we would talk, and I would do something about this attraction I had for her. I couldn’t tell how she felt about me. She went from fear to desire to annoyance and then confusion all in the time that she was at the bar. I only wanted her to feel one of those with me. I had seen the look of interest in her eyes right before she closed the door to the cab. It was something that I could work with, and I was going to.
She said she had just started an internship. It made me think she wasn’t going anywhere, and I needed to bide my time until I saw her. I didn’t want to look too eager, but I certainly was going to look for any excuse to talk to her. She had always been beautiful to me but seeing how she matured, changed, and grown since I had seen her last only made her more attractive. I could already see that she would be a wonderful wife and mother one day. I longed to start that life with her, but I needed to take things one step at a time. The woman freaked out enough when I told her I was attracted to her; she might run for the hills if she knew what I had planned for us.
We never discussed it, but once Logan, Eric, and I were at the bar the next day, we ended up in Eric’s office. We would do a meeting about once a month to touch base and had done so only a few weeks ago. It didn’t surprise me that we all needed to talk and process what we had heard the night before. I wanted to make sure that Eric was okay, as would Logan. I knew he wasn’t, but I still needed to check on him. We would also need to know what he wanted to do going forward.
“Never a dull moment at Mustang Sally’s,” Logan said as we sat down in Eric’s office.
“A little bit more than I was expecting,” Eric said.
