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Except her body tingled again. A specific part of her body. A very specific part.
“We’ve never done this,” she said, her eyes slinking left and right. “Hung out alone and talked like this. Shit, you’ve been inside me and we—”
“Hands don’t count.” When they both looked at his on the table, he was quick to drop them to the bench at his sides. “They don’t.”
“Hmm,” she said, slipping her foot from her shoe as she slid lower in her seat to run her toe up the inside of his leg, past his knee, to his thigh and on. “What about feet?”
He caught her foot and held it tight without pushing away or recoiling.
Though he did cover his eyes, supporting the weight of his head. “Why the fuck is this happening now? Last week you were Immie. I’d have gone to war for you ‘cause you’re my buddy’s family…”
“And this week?” she asked. “You wouldn’t go to war for me?”
He peeked over the edge of his hand. The darkness in those eyes. The mystery wasn’t in the details. It wasn’t in his unknown past or the question marks over his character. Those would apply with a stranger. This man wasn’t a stranger.
“Genny…”
“I always knew you were attractive, that’s obvious, but…”
“Yeah,” he said, letting his arm drop. “Not like I never heard guys talk about you… or beat on some of them with Ford.”
“You beat on guys for me?”
“Just the disrespectful ones.”
Was that adorable or hilarious? Both.
“You never struck me as the kind of guy who’d stand up for a woman’s honor,” she said, bobbing her head in a side-to-side nod. “No, you did… But you also seem like the kind of guy who knows how to enjoy a woman.”
“Yeah. There are available women and then there are…” He drew an invisible line with the side of his hand and pushed it back. “Off-limits women.” He gestured at her. “Which you are. Off-limits.”
“Is that what it is? I’m forbidden fruit?”
“If that’s what it was, I’d have wanted you like this ten years ago.”
And there it was. Out there. He wanted her. Relaxing, she let herself look into him. Let herself be tempted by his dark demons and shadowy past. He was more than any man she’d known. More complex. More broken. More forbidden.
“You know, you’d be doing Ford a favor if you dated me.”
Sensing her joke, his jaw rose. “Oh, yeah, how’s that?”
“He’s never liked any of my boyfriends. Never one.”
“Some of them he’s liked right up until the moment they became your boyfriend. You never noticed that?”
Her hair fluttered around her upper arms when she shook her head. “Nope. He’ll like one of them one day.”
“Always were a dreamer,” he said. “Always an optimist.”
“Wasn’t always easy,” she said. “A part of me got left behind when we left the city. When Mom met Ted and… Everything I knew was here, it was my home. Ford was my home. His routine. His strength. His presence. His buddies… Sometimes I think…”
Maybe it wasn’t the time to get deep. Not the first time her thoughts got ahead of her mouth.
“Sometimes you think what?”
Well, he was asking.
She smiled and surrendered. “It hurt more losing him than it did losing my dad… I was always sort of invisible to Strat,” which was what people called her father. “I was his princess. His angel. Yeah, but that was like this ethereal thing. Intangible. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t me. He stood up for his little girl because that’s what men like him do.”
