Page 18 of No Kind of Hero
He had to take a breath. In and out. “I don’t need your favors. If I want to kiss somebody, I can find somebody to kiss. And if I want somebody to—” He was going to say it, but then he couldn’t say it to her after all, plus the fact that he couldn’t say it in front of Gracie. It made him furious that he still cared about hurting Beth. Why didn’t he ever learn? “I can find that too,” he said instead. “You bet I can.”
The pink was creeping into her cheeks. “Of course I know that. I know I’m not some prize. At least I know it now. I’ve learned.” He was trying to let that not affect him when she went on in a big hurry, “I meant the opposite. I meant, at the time I thought, this is just going to mix me up more, and maybe mess you up too. I wanted to do it so much, which means it was probably exactly wrong. But I also thought it wouldn’t be good for you. Like you’d still feel the same way about me you did before. And obviously that was incredibly presumptuous of me.”
He was trying to follow all that. “It was presumptuous of you to think that if I took you to bed, it would . . . what? Get me hung up on you again?”
The pink was all the way there, suffusing her skin, which had always been nearly transparent, the fine blue veins visible beneath like she was made of finer, more delicate stuff than a normal person. Like she was breakable.Thatwas what had messed him up. “I know,” she said. “See how bad it sounds? So I came here to say . . .” She hauled in a breath. “That I’ve realized how dumb that was, and since I’d been thinking I should do something crazy anyway, maybe I should . . . go ahead. Maybeweshould. Maybe that would make it go away, the stuff we’re still carrying around. At least the stuff I am. We could light it up. We could burn it down. If you wanted.”
He didn’t answer for a long minute. Gracie protested from where she was standing backwards on his shoulders, and he swung her down, jiggled her absently, and finally said, “If you came here to seduce me, I’d kind of think you’d have dressed better.”
“Oh, man.” Beth rubbed her hands over her face and laughed, an explosive little sound like pressure relief. “I know. I changed my clothes so many times. I thought that maybe if I didn’t look like I was trying, it wouldn’t seem so . . . desperate. I’d just be putting it out there. But I’m bad at putting it out there. I should have worn a dress or something, the kind you used to like. Nonverbal communication. See, my nonverbal communication is . . . it’s a growth area for me.”
He laughed himself. He couldn’t help it, but she jerked back. “Sorry,” he said. “But you have to admit it’s funny.” Gracie was climbing his chest again. “This is your basic TV repairman fantasy, except . . .”
“Except not.” She was starting to smile at last, losing some of the tension. “I guess you’re not supposed to do it in front of somebody’s baby.”
“Probably not.”
“And it should be a sundress,” she said, “since that way you can, you know.”
“Mm,” he agreed. “Reach under it. Shove it up. Yeah. That’d be the idea.”
“So how do we, uh . . . I mean nothere,”she hurried to say. “Obviously.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “You don’t do this a lot. Proposition guys while they’re working.”
“Don’t forget the baby.”
“Well, yeah. That’s kind of the icing on the cake.” He was still talking, and she was, too, with close to that ease they’d had in the very beginning, when she’d tell him everything she was thinking and he’d listen and think how funny she was, even when she didn’t know it. And at the same time, the top of his head was about to blow off.
Another guy might have had some pride, would have told her to forget it, that he wasn’t going to be her vacation fling. But another guy hadn’t felt her up against the wall at the Yacht Club the night before, and that guy didn’t know how hot and tight and wet she’d be, or how she’d wrap those long legs around you if it would get you inside her faster. Another guy wouldn’t know any of it. Only him.
Last night, he’d wanted to chase her down, pull her around by the hand, and say, “That girl I used to know. What happened to her? You think this is an improvement? Because it’s not. You’re eating yourself up from inside. Is that really better? How? Why would you want it?” He’d been furious with her. Furiousforher. But he hadn’t chased her down, and he hadn’t asked her a single thing, because she wasn’t his business. She wanted to wreck her life? Fine. She wasn’t his problem.
She didn’t have to become his problem, either. But if she wanted to burn it down? He could do that. All it would take was one match.
Now that Beth thought about it, she could see that ofcoursea sundress was the exact right outfit for showing up at a man’s workplace to offer him your body. Not a trench coat, because that would look ridiculous in Wild Horse in August, and it would be too hot anyway. A filmy sundress, though? Yes, obviously. With a V-neck and a fluttery hem, something that buttoned all the way from the neckline on down—but that you’d left unbuttoned to well above the knee because you might not have much in the way of breasts, but you did have good legs. You’d stand there in the high-heeled-yet-fun sandals that showed off those legs and start unbuttoning. Slowly, while your mouth parted and your legs trembled and you watched him heating up. Until he took that step forward and finished the job.
Or maybe he’d even do that thing he’d said. Reach under your dress, shove your skirt up, and put you on a convenient counter, because he couldn’t wait, and he had to do it right now. Except that he’d drop to his knees first, out there in the open, and work you over until you were crying out and pulling his hair and . . .
Yeah. That. What had she been reading all those smutty novels for if she hadn’t even figured that out? Also, your hair should clearly be in some sort of knot with pins that would fall out as soon as he shoved his hand into it, not a braid. A braid was as unsexy as it came.
If you had an old-flame-seducing sundress in your closet, that is. Or high-heeled sandals, for that matter.
Meanwhile, here in the real world, Evan was standing there holding his baby girl andshewas standing there in her resolutely flat sandals and her khaki shorts, and no reaching-under of any kind was happening. Or any unbuttoning, either.
The moment stretched out until Evan said, amusement or heat or both warming those ice-blue eyes, “Well, yeah. If you put it that way. We could do that.”
“Good,” she said. “Right.” And tried to breathe.
If this were a client meeting, she’d be moving on, wrapping it up and setting the next appointment. That was an even worse idea than the khaki shorts, though.
Face it, she didn’t know how to do this. Plus, Gracie was distracting. Her white-blonde hair stuck up around her head like dandelion fluff, her eyes were huge, round, and blue, and she was wearing a pale-blue romper printed with tiny brown rabbits that was just impossibly cute. Beth smiled at her, maybe because she didn’t have to think about the appropriate response to a baby, Gracie smiled back, wide, joyous, and toothless, and something bright and warm as a sunbeam pierced Beth’s heart.
“Did you buy her outfit?” she asked Evan. “Gracie’s? You a bunny guy?” And then realized that she’d drawn him straight off the target, and shewantedthe target.
“Hm?” he asked. “Oh. Yeah.” He jiggled her some more. “She likes rabbits.”
“Do you?” Beth asked her. “Do you like bunnies that hop?”
