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She exhaled. “We’re talking about sex again.”
“You can’t help yourself.”
Except it was him who’d brought it up that time.
Laying her hands on the table, she slid down, stretching her legs to prop her bare feet on his seat at either side of him.
“Can I talk to you about something… serious?”
This time when he looked up, his concentration was intrigued. “You can talk to me about anything.”
“In confidence?”
Daire put down the pen and curved a hand around her ankle without breaking eye contact. “Everything between us is confidential.”
After following the clues and ending up at Olympus, she’d dealt with discovering her father and that the man she’d been sleeping with for weeks wasn’t really the man she thought he was.
Since they’d stopped moving and found this bolt hole, there had been more time to consider possibilities. Even unpleasant ones.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I… I didn’t want to cause trouble, to stir things up when I don’t have any resources at my disposal.”
“I’m a resource at your disposal,” he said, skimming his hand up her shin and around to cradle her calf. “Talk to me, Little Red.”
Opening her mouth, she pulled in a breath ready to burden him with what had been bothering her for weeks. Before she uttered a syllable, the door opened.
Her feet landed on the floor as she twisted to see Harry coming inside.
As soon as her father noticed her, his frown deepened. “What are you doing here?” he asked her.
“Talking,” she said, sort of wishing she’d done up the buttons of her shirt again. It wasn’t like she was indecent, though her father may wonder why she was so uncovered in the shade of the Beast. “What are you doing here?”
“Working,” Harry said, closing the door. “Like Ares is trying to do. My men don’t have time to entertain you.”
“No,” she said, sliding out of the dinette. “I am aware of that.”
“Tess,” Daire said, reaching across the table though he didn’t actually make physical contact.
When their eyes met, she smiled. “No big deal.” She turned away from him. “I’ll leave you guys alone.”
Harry stepped aside so she could get to the door. Once outside, on her own in the garage, she stopped. The glass-paneled garage door was open. Wide open. It had been when she went inside too. At that point, she hadn’t thought much about it. For some reason, in that new moment, the possibility of freedom was tempting.
She didn’t know how long she stood there wondering if it would be possible to build a life with nothing but the clothes on her back. It couldn’t have been long because someone said her name. When she turned, Harry was coming out of the Beast.
“I’m going,” Tess said, guessing he suspected her of eavesdropping.
“No, wait,” he said, closing the trailer door.
Now it was her turn to be suspicious. “What is it? What did I do now?”
“Nothing,” he said. It wasn’t like him to be anything other than confident, so the less than stern look on his face confused her. “Blunt is what I do.”
That didn’t really help her out. “Excuse me?”
“What I do… I have to be abrupt… I’m not required to be…”
“Subtle?” Tess hazarded a guess. “Because whatever you’re doing now is even less than that.”
For a few seconds, he continued to struggle both with his expression and his words. Eventually he straightened up and set a more assured look onto his face.
