Her tone is soft and I latch on to it, forcing my mind to turn away from the shadows lingering at the edge, and smile. “What do you want to do for dinner?”
“I’m sorry?” Inara blinks and shakes her head as if I’ve just asked her what to name our firstborn. Erm, her firstborn. Who will definitely be sired by a man who isn’t me.
At the thought of what that would entail, a low growl rumbles up my throat. I give my head a quick shake. What the fuck is wrong with me? Must be too much sun.
“Dinner.” Talking about food is safe ground, though admittedly anything would have been preferable to discussing my relationship with my parents. Or thinking about her making a baby with some random guy. “I’m too tired to cook. Maybe we could go out tonight?”
“Like a date?” She gushes in an exaggerated Southern drawl and an eye-rolling flutter of her lashes.
One side of my mouth hikes up in a lopsided smile. “Yup.”
I don’t undermine the request with a joke or cheapen it with a pick-up line or some bit of inferred innuendo. Instead, I study her with the same intensity she had outside. Her gaze skirts around the room, and she tucks a curl behind one ear. If I didn’t know better, I would say Mrs. Martinez is a bit bashful at the idea of dating her husband.
If I didn’t know better.
But I do.
“Yeah, okay.”
Her answer lifts a weight off my chest and I’m ready to give her whatever she wants. Hell, far as I’m concerned, we could head to a McDonald’s drive-thru as long as she’s in the car beside me. “Anywhere you want. You pick.”
I stop working and sit back on my heels, my complete focus on my wife. And she’s beautiful, even covered in dust. A curl flops back over her forehead and I’m itching to brush it back, but I sit and stare, mesmerized until she tilts her head and smiles. “I wanna sing.”
Somehow that little curl has ended up like silk between my fingertips. I study it in silence for what may have been an eternity while Inara holds her breath. Something as sweet as it is dangerous has taken up some pretty valuable real estate in the center of my chest and I don’t dare examine it because there’s a part of me that already knows what I’ll see.
“Well, all right.” I tuck the curl behind her ear, fingers brushing the delicate curve where a small silver stud sits before I pull away. “I know just the place.”