Page 28 of Between the Lines

“No.” She drew the word out into three syllables. “You know what I mean. Sex. Us.”

She’d managed to shock him. He’d thought that she might read that item and tuck it away in that busy brain to think about later. She might even have ignored it entirely, refusing to give him the satisfaction of letting him know that she was thinking about it.

Never in his wildest dreams—and when it came to Jo, he had a lot of dreams—had he imagined that she would come right out and ask him what he thought about them having sex.

“I think I’ve made it pretty obvious what I want here.” He cast her a sidelong look. “That’s why we’re in this car, right? This is a date.”

“It’s a date, but I wasn’t planning on sleeping with you after it,” she replied archly. He made a show of wincing.

“Way to hurt a man where it counts, Jo. Right in the desperate hope.”

“You’ve never been desperate in your life,” she snorted, tapping her phone on her knee. She was quiet for a moment, and he had to claw back the urge to demand to know what was running through her head.

“I’m not saying this properly.” She swallowed, tapping her phone faster. “Look. I know that I write about a lot of...stuff. Kinky stuff. And you must think I write about it convincingly, or you wouldn’t have offered me this job.”

“Right.” He drew out the word, his pulse picking up. She’d always been easy for him to read, but right now he truly didn’t know what she was thinking.

“You’re going to make me spell it out, aren’t you?” She huffed out a breath, then scrubbed her hands over her face. “Look. I write about kink because I’m interested in it. But I don’t...you know I don’t do all of those things, right?”

Her words came out in a rush. A terrible, wild hope began to build up inside him.

“Are you saying that you want to try some of those things?” His attention had been on her since the moment he’d walked into that office, but now it was laser focused.

“Yes.” His Jo had never been anything but direct, and right now, by God, he appreciated it. “But I don’t... I’m not interested in exploring with most people.”

“Are you saying that you’re interested in exploring with me?” His hands clenched on the steering wheel.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Turning, she looked up at him with those wide gray eyes. “But I need you to understand that that doesn’t...it doesn’t mean that things are the way they were before.”

The tiniest dart of pain hooked itself into his chest. He’d known that she wouldn’t welcome him back with open arms, but it still hadn’t killed the evil that was hope.

He wasn’t a man to settle for halves when he wanted the whole—he was, however, a man who’d learned that nothing was sweeter than something you’d worked for.

“So what you’re saying is, you want to use me for my body and nothing else?” Her cheeks were flushed, and he knew that it wasn’t from the wind as they flew down the interstate. “I’d be a very stupid man not to take you up on that offer, Jo Marchande. I like to think I’m rather clever.”

“So you don’t need to do stuff like...this.” She gestured out the window as the Jag swung onto the exit to the town of Concord. “Planning dates. Being charming. You know.”

“Baby, my charm is natural. You should know I’ve never been without it.” He grinned at her, wiggling his eyebrows, and she giggled, a wholly un-Jo-like sound, but one he was pleased to have pulled from her. “As for the date. Just go with it. You might have been here sometime since I left, but I wanted to bring you here anyway.”

“Bedford Street.” Letting his GPS navigate them through the town, he finally brought the car to a stop outside a large set of wrought-iron gates. On either side of the entrance were long, low-slung stone walls, worn with age and slicked with moss.

Jo squinted forward, reading the sign.

“Sleepy Hollow Cemetery,” she read, her words tinged with confusion. He waited patiently.

Every other woman he’d dated would have been horrified to be taken to a cemetery on a date, and rightly so. But this truly was someplace he’d wanted to take her for well over a decade, and when the confusion on her face gave way to delight, he knew he’d scored a home run.

“Author’s Ridge!” Shoving her phone back into the pocket of her pants, she undid her seat belt, then scrambled out of the car. “Let’s go!”

High on the success of his idea, Theo followed more slowly, catching up with her as she paused to take a picture of the cemetery entrance. “How have you not been here yet?”

She shrugged, turning to get a shot from the other direction. “Well, I drive, but I don’t trust my scooter to go this far. And no one I know is even the slightest bit interested in going to see graves.”

“Their loss.” He shrugged. He wasn’t overly pumped about graveyards as a whole, but knowing how much Jo had wanted to come here made it appealing for him. Plus, he thought as he looked around, sucking in the clean air of the wide space, the freshly budding trees and the scent of spring, there were worse ways to spend an afternoon than outdoors, exploring history.

“Come on!” More animated than she’d been since he’d come back, at least to him, she grabbed a paper map from a box affixed to the gate. “Did you know that Ralph Waldo Emerson gave the dedication speech when the cemetery first opened? And that he’s buried here?”

Theo chuckled as he followed after her. Watching Jo study the map, her brow furrowed, something settled in his chest, something that he recognized as contentment.

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