Page 27 of The Rogue
She wasn’t sure that it was true. But she got behind the wheel of her car all the same and followed Justice back to King’s Crest. When they got there, he got out of his truck as she exited her car. “I told everybody.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I told them not to make you tell the story. So that should just be handled.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re going to make it through this. We’ll figure it out.”
“I had the next three weeks off,” she said. “For the honeymoon. All my shifts are covered.”
They had planned on spending their wedding night at a B&B in Copper Ridge, then they were supposed to be spending two weeks fixing her house up. Making it theirs. And then they planned to go to the most beautiful resort she’d ever seen, with a spa and mountain views. A suite with a fireplace and a private hot tub.
It had been her perfect getaway. Nothing like she’d ever had as a child.
And nothing she would have now either, so great.
“Good. Take the time off. Let’s figure out the house thing. Let’s figure out all the things.”
“You don’t have to help me. I have the time. I just... Thank you for giving me the space. Because if I had to worry about where I was going to sleep on top of everything else I really don’t know how I was going to...”
Her entire life had imploded. That realization hit her in a wave. Her entire life had just caved in on her.
“Well, in honor of the fact that you don’t have anything going for a little bit, I say we go out and have some fun this week.”
“What?”
“Hey,” he said. “You’re not living like you right now. Maybe you should live like me.”
Chapter Seven
The very first thing Rue had to deal with was figuring out what the heck to do about her house. Of course, the notices had gone up on a Sunday so she couldn’t call anyone about it, which left her with the Mondayest Monday ever.
The beginning of what would have been the first week of her married life. The kind of day Rue usually saw as a fresh start began by just feeling stale and awful and generally horrendous.
Justice hadn’t gone out last night, which she knew was weird for him, and even still she half expected to run into a half-dressed woman somewhere in the house. She knew that Justice wasn’t one for restraint, but he was being saintly. He was always good to her. He was always nice. But this sort of sainted-savior thing with nothing that she could even begin to reciprocate was starting to get to her, and then added to that, when she woke up there were no half-naked women; she just didn’t even know how to orient herself.
Everything was already weird.
When Justice came into the house while she was making coffee, having clearly been out, she couldn’t hold it in. “Oh. Did you have sex somewhere else?”
“Excuse me?” He looked scandalized. He lookedlike he might have clutched his pearls if he was wearing some.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “It was a perfectly reasonable thing to ask.”
“It was the fuck not. I prefer to dance around things in double entendre, Rue. I prefer to show up looking laconic and disheveled, and laugh and make asides that could be interpreted in multiple ways. I am a gentleman. I do not kiss and tell.”
“No, you just bang and insinuate.”
“As God intended.”
“Well, I’m asking,” she said.
And she actually didn’t know why she was. Why she was preoccupied with that. She had just been thinking about the fact that he was being overly saintly and solicitous and she didn’t want him to feel like he had to do that. Because she wanted things to be normal, and this would be normal, except it also felt...
Maybe she was just feeling insecure. And she was projecting it onto Justice. There was the little issue of feeling possessive of him.
Itdidhappen sometimes.
