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“No.”
I raise a brow. “No?”
“No.” Nadia lifts her chin. “It’s been how long? You left town and—”
“I wonder why.” I pitch my voice just right, laced with enough sarcasm she flinches.
She wants to smack me. Her hand jerks, but she keeps it there. I’m not real proud of the moment at all.
Instead, she juts out her chin and swishes her long ponytail over her shoulder. “Because you were a dirtbag that tricked me?”
“Oh, you’d like to think so, wouldn’t you? Paint yourself the innocent in this?”
“Aren’t I? You told me you would be there for me, always, and then you. . .” She stops. “Showed your true colors.”
“And you showed yours, way too happy to believe everything anyone had to say about me.”
I want to kiss her. I want to show doughboy how to take control. I want to feel the soft heat of her mouth under mine and see if her kisses are just as good as I remember. She wants me to.
The night air’s thick with longing.
Turning on my heel I go in the opposite direction, just enough to put space between us. Enough so I can get my equilibrium back, something Nadia’s always been good at destroying. Ever since she turned sixteen, I realized I wasn’t looking at a scrawny kid but someone who looked like a woman.
This is like old fucking times, when we’d fight, and it would lead to hot sex. Toward the end, it was all we’d do. Argue, that is minus the sex.
I shove a hand over my hair and swear.
“On a grand fuckin’ scale of proud moments, this . . .” I wave a hand in the air, “is not there. At all. Fuck.”
“I don’t want to fight.”
Turning back to her, I half smile. “Yeah, you fuckin’ do.”
“Okay.” She practically hisses the word at me. “I do. There’s so much that we should clear.”
“Or leave alone.”
“You’ll go back to Dallas, won’t you and your life, and never think about me again.”
“Nadie, I—”
She sighs. “Don’t. Don’t finish that. You came to do me a favor, maybe work an angle of your own. I don’t know, I’m trying not to care because you’ll do what you can to help Jay. And maybe you’re right. Maybe we should just leave it all alone.”
“Yeah, okay.” Fucked if it is or not. But fighting’s only going to lead to trouble. It might be delicious, but trouble is trouble, and I’m looking down the barrel of a whole lot of it already. I don’t need more.
Nadia takes in a shaking breath. “We’re not together, me and loverboy.”
“I’m calling him douche from now on, and it’s not my business, is it?”
A small party of people walk past, eyeing us with naked curiosity, and I don’t feel like being more fodder for gossip than I am.
“Guess not.”
“Hey, Longstocking?”
A little smile cracks. “Yes?”
“That bar still there? The one on the edge of downtown we used to go to?” The kind of dive where it didn’t matter if the guy from the wrong side of town went there with the pretty rich girl.
