Page 20 of Good Guy Gabe

Goddammit.

I do not want to know.

“I’ll go,” she blurts out, and I hear the warble in her voice. I hear the unshed tears.

I shove Evan back so hard he stumbles into someone holding up their phone, knocking him on his ass, but we’re saved by valet.

“We’re leaving,” I tell Joss as I help her into my truck. “Together.”

Chapter 10

Joss

IFEEL SICK. Actually nauseous. Gabe’s knuckles are white on the steering wheel, as are the ones on my thigh. I think he wants the touch to be calming, but he’s too pissed to be comforting.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper once we’re out of the parking lot and heading toward the suburbs and I finally find my voice again.

“Don’t—” he snarls, only to cut himself off short. He takes a deep breath, rubs his palm on my thigh to loosen his fingers, and starts over. “That voice wasn’t for you. It was for Evan. And Emily and everyone else. Don’t apologize for them and don’t apologize for what your husband did.”

“He was a monster. You have no idea.”

He laces our fingers together on the console between us. “I’m not very smart. I do and say a lot of dumb things. But one thing I do know is people who are horrible, it’s the ones closest to them who get hurt the most, whether it’s because they’re the biggest victims or because they’re the ones who get destroyed by the fallout. Sure, sometimes their loved ones are in on it, but that’s not you. No way.”

“How do you know that?” He’s not wrong; I was quite literally the one who had to pay for Brian’s crimes. But Gabe barely knows me. And I knew my husband for years but had no idea what he was doing to his own patients right under my nose.

“Because you hate Tammy Buckner.”

“I do not!” I protest before it hits me how irrelevant that is. Tammy’s one of my subscribers. I don’t know how he even knows her name.

He shoots me a playful grin, one of his many larger-than-life expressions because everything he does is larger than life. “Ma’am, I have watched four of your livestreams, and every single one of them, Tammy said something I can only guess was asinine. I don’t know anything about quilting, so I couldn’t say for sure, but I got that vibe. And you thanked her and told her you’d take her advice into consideration, and every single time, you looked like you were about to burst a capillary for all the restraint you were putting on yourself.”

“You can’t even tell binding is machine stitched on the first side!”

He takes the stop sign as an opportunity to lean across the console and steal a swift, unexpected kiss, but the car behind us lays on the horn when we sit a half second longer than appropriate.

“You wear your heart on your sleeve. Plenty enough locals love you so much that I can tell everyone else is wrong about you. And I’m really excited to prove them wrong, too.”

He’s finally relaxed, melting back into his seat and loosening his grip on the wheel, absently rubbing his giant, rough thumb up and down the back of my comparatively dwarfed hand. His lips are curled into a natural smile, like that’s his default, and he’s just happy to be here.

Happy to be with me.

I’m happy to be with him. I want to pinch myself to see if this is real. He makes me feel good.

And thinking about that has my mind going to howgoodhe made me feel in the bathroom. “Why are you wearing a cup, anyway?”

I don’t know what I’m expecting, if it’s going to turn out that the quarterback has a history of punching his teammates in the crotch or if he’s going to be embarrassed about a medical condition or if this is going to be the thing he won’t tell me so I can feel like we’re even on secrets. Instead, he replies immediately with, “Because I got to start my day by holding your boobs, and I figured that every time I thought about that, I’d get a boner. I didn’t want to be dealing with that all day.”

I’m the one blushing with his confession. Of course he’s attracted to me. He’s made that clear enough already. He’s already kissed me and defended me and made me orgasm. Did I feel a twinge of self-consciousness when he wouldn’t let me touch him back? Yes, absolutely, but now I get why. The poor man’s probably been uncomfortable all night.

We’re far enough from downtown that the road is mostly empty. Wilmington has highways that reach out to the suburbs, but they’ve been built along slower-moving surface roads. We’re on one of those, and we have several miles lined with undeveloped woods ahead of us.

Brian, the asshole, valued nothing more than propriety from me. I never did anything considered lewd, and he never asked or expected me to. So when I scoot toward Gabe in my seat and pivot myself to face him, my conscience is telling me to stop. What I’m thinking isn’t okay. Gabe is going to reject me.

Gabe glances at me, his eyes dipping to my cleavage. I see the twinkling there.

I grab for his belt.

He rests his giant hand over mine yet again, not necessarily stopping me but slowing me down, at least. “Whatcha doing there?”

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