Page 72 of The Outsider

It was like every moment of seeing her from that first time collided with this one. Her brilliance. Her sharpness. The humor and the ferocity. Her climbing up on the barn. The triumph of her succeeding. Her books. Self-improvement and a romance novel.

The way she had told him about what she wanted.

He had never known anybody like her. When he thought about it, he wasn’t exactly sure he knew anybody. Not as well as he knew her. They had talked about a lot of things. And he admired her.

More than that...

She was beautiful.

And feral as hell. And he was angry that some other guy had been dancing with her.

He didn’t want Andrea, because he wanted Bix.

His stomach went tight.

No. Hell no. Bix was...

She was his to protect. She wasn’t his to... to possess like that. Suddenly, it was like she sensed him standing there, and she looked in his direction.

She startled for a moment, and looked like she might run. It was a reminder. Of the way they had met. Of how she had been when he had found her.

She had pretended to be afraid. But deep down, he suspected that she was a little bit.

“Hey,” he said.

He lifted his fishing pole.

“Oh hi,” she said. “I guess technically I’m fishing on private land without permission.”

“Are you?”

She sighed. “No. I even got a fishing license down at the general store last week.” She looked distressed. “My street cred is irretrievably damaged.”

He couldn’t help himself. He laughed. He felt, for a moment, like he was back on even footing with her. But then she smiled, and his world felt rocked again.

He pictured her like she’d been then. With that scab on her chin. He could still see that woman, there beneath the healthier, smiling one now. But it wasn’t who she was.

It never had been.

It was what life had done to her. And the person she was now, was the woman who had dug out of it.

It would be tempting to feel a certain level of triumph over that. To take credit for it.

But he and his father had been responsible for ruining more lives than intervening in this one could ever make right.

“My condolences over your inability to poach.”

She snickered, then started to reel her line back in. “Thank you.”

They hadn’t spoken since last night. That moment when things had been charged. He knew he wasn’t imagining it. He knew it, because he was standing in the bolt of lightning that had resulted from it. Cardboard-cutout Captain America.

And he had been shirtless, and in the shower thinking about her while he was naked, and even if it hadn’t been a sexual fantasy, it had still been a step over a line he hadn’t been aware he was so close to.

For somebody who thought it was cardboard, she had an awful lot of thoughts about his sex life.

Unfortunately, so did he, since it had been nonexistent for close to a year now.

Maybe there was some truth to what she’d said. He had become a cardboard cutout.

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