Page 54 of Love You
“Could be.” He brushed his lips over the top of her head.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She closed her eyes.
“Then we’ll talk about something else.” But he didn’t say anything, leaving the door wide open for her. The best part was that he kept rocking her.
She breathed him in. For a shirtless guy who’d been lying around all day, he smelled pretty good. Salty with a hint of that soap he used. He reached over for the remote control and she heard the TV go off.
“You were watching the game.”
“Don’t worry about it, the Giants are having a bad season anyway.”
A long silence stretched between them and it started to feel awkward, especially because Darcy’s face was still buried in Win’s most excellent chest. But she didn’t exactly want to leave his chest, his arms . . . his apartment. So she just sat there, cuddled against him, thinking of a less depressing topic than her parents’ looming divorce.
“You coming to work tomorrow?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a rock climbing tour first thing in the morning.”
“You’re going to scare off the clients with that eye of yours,” she said.
“I doubt it. It’ll just make me look tough.”
“You’re sort of delusional, you know that, right?” She twisted around to look at him. “You can’t find someone else to guide it?” His eye, if not his whole face, had to hurt.
“Nah. We’re short-staffed as it is. The fresh air will do me good. How about you? Will you be taking your days off?”
She hadn’t really thought about it but it was TJ’s edict that she use her comp days this week and Lewis continued to hound her over doing his data entry. “Probably.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to do your asshole ex’s bidding? Besides being a champion of children of divorce, Win was also, apparently, a mind reader.
“Okay, I won’t tell you.”
He got up and she instantly missed the contact. Worse, he found a shirt in one of the many piles cluttering his apartment and put it on.
“Seriously, you’re going to use one of your days off to do more work? That’s just crazy town.”
She laughed because the statement was so quintessentially Win. Why work when you can play?
“It’s my time to do what I like with it,” she said.
“You told me yourself that you’re doing it out of some bizarre sense of duty . . . or guilt.” He combed his fingers through his hair. “Why? Especially if he’s the one who left you.”
“I left him.”
“That’s not what you said.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Try me out,” Win said. “I’m smarter than I look.”
No way was she handing him the single most humiliating scrap of her life on a platter. Not going to happen. Women threw themselves at Win Garner. How would he ever understand that Darcy’s own husband wouldn’t touch her? That most of the time, Lewis had chosen the guest room over their marital bed. And when he did deign to lie next to her, he treated her like a dead fish.
“There’s nothing to explain. He fell out of love with me.” Or never had been in the first place. “And I left him. End of story.”
“Okay.” Win sat at one of the mismatched barstools at his kitchen counter. “Then why work for him?”
“Because we’re still friends. And friends help each other.”
“Not buying it. I saw you with him at the rodeo. I wasn’t getting a strong friend vibe off of you. Just the opposite, in fact.”
