Page 25 of No Kind of Hero
“I’m sorry,” she told him, standing at his truck with him and wrapping her arms around herself against the cold. “You lost almost a whole day of work. I didn’t even think of that. You could have left once we got Rosie to the vet. I’m so grateful, but I’m sorry I didn’t think to tell you that.”
“No,” he said. He wasn’t exactly emoting all over the place, but he was looking straight at her, and somehow, the emotion was there. His face was impassive, but she could see into him anyway. “I couldn’t have left you. And I wouldn’t have. And I’d like to take you out.”
“Did your mom say why she did that?” Evan asked. Not that he was surprised. Putting Rosie down without telling Beth had been a purely lousy thing to do. Which was why he wasn’t surprised Michelle Schaefer had done it.
He was sorry about Rosie. She’d been a good dog, and she’d sure stuck like glue to Beth. That first week, her leg in the cast, she’d defied the paint smell that irritated her sensitive nose in order to be close to her savior, and maybe that was natural. But when Beth came home from college the next summer, nothing had changed. Rosie had loved Beth with all the adoration a dog could give, and Beth had loved her right back. Evan had thought he was seeing that Beth knew how to love, that she knew how to stick. Good thing he knew better now, and that he wasn’t looking for anything more than right-this-minute.
He should get a dog like that for Gracie when she got a little bit older, though. Except that he wasn’t home enough for it, and his mom didn’t like dogs much. Too bad. A dog would be good for a girl when she was sad and lonely and her dad couldn’t fix it, as much as Evan wanted to think he could fix anything. No matter what her troubles were, a dog would always let a girl know she was wonderful, and Evan wanted that for Gracie.
“What?” Beth asked, like she’d forgotten what they were talking about. She put her roller back in the pan and rolled it around. She wasn’t painting very fast, but you could say that Evan didn’t care.
“Why she had Rosie put down then,” he reminded her.
“Oh.” Beth climbed up onto the draped counter and started painting above the mirror. “She said I didn’t need that distraction before the bar exam, that it was better that way.”
He thought about that a minute. “Like you couldn’t handle the truth.”
“Yes.”She was slapping the paint on like it had offended her. “And Ihatedthat I wasn’t there to hold Rosie through that so she wouldn’t be scared. She should have fallen asleep feeling loved. Feeling safe. I could have done that no matter what test I was taking. I felt so selfish that I hadn’t asked about her enough, or I hadn’t come home to see her anyway, no matter what my mom said. I was too . . . focused, and Rosie was the one who suffered, and she shouldn’t havehadto suffer. I knew it was really me, my fault, but I was mad at my mom anyway. You know how she is, so sure that she’s doing what’s best for me. She has trouble with boundaries.”
“Yeah.” If Evan’s tone was dry, who could blame him? “I remember.”
Which should have been enough right there to make him take one big old step back. It might have been, too, if he didn’t . . . well, still like Beth so much. Not to mention remembering the day when she’d showed him every bit of her courage and her heart. She’d walked him out to his truck that night after their Rosie-Rescue, and he’d told her he wanted to take her out. Instead of playing any kind of games, she’d uttered a startled little laugh and said, “I spent all this morning trying to get up the courage to ask you. Yes.Yes.”And he’d thrown caution to the winds and taken the fall.
He’d stood there the next night listening to the popcorn machine as the minutes ticked by, had told himself she probably wouldn’t show up and it didn’t matter anyway, because she was going back to Seattle in a week. And then shehadshowed up, and her smile had been so wide at seeing him, it had been all he could do not to take her in his arms right then and there, except that he hadn’t wanted to scare her off, as tentative as she always seemed. Like she was as drawn to him as he was to her, but she wasn’t sure it was all right to be. Exactly the same way he felt.
He hadn’t missed that she was meeting him at the theater instead of having him pick her up at home. Another red flag that should have warned him off and hadn’t, even though he’d caught thedon’t-even-think-about-itdaggers from velvet-over-iron Michelle Schaefer every day for a week, in a cold war that had escalated to DEFCON-3 by now. And then there was richest-man-in-townDonSchaefer, who probably wasn’t too happy about Evan either.
Of course, now that Evan was a dad himself, he got that one. He knew what kinds of ideas he’d had about Beth during those first days of her winter break, when she’d wander into whatever room he was painting as if she were bored, and as if she could wander right out again. Tight jeans, long legs, and long-sleeved T-shirts that covered her up and showed her to him all at once, and that multicolored hair falling over her shoulder in its braid. By the time he’d finally cracked, had stopped thinking about her dad and her mom and the job and the company he and Russell were working so hard to expand, about how this was his best ticket, hisonlyticket . . . by the time he’d forgotten about the word-of-mouth that got them the jobs, about his bank balance and Russell’s and all the rest of it and had asked Beth out, he’d been fairly obsessed with getting his hands in that hair. Preferably while she was on her back, although if he was sitting with her in his lap and unfastening her braid while she looked at him with those shining blue eyes, maybe even trembled a little from all the passion she hid under the cool exterior? Andthenhe put her on her back?
Well, yeah. That worked too.
It had been another long four nights after that first date before he’d managed to get his hands in her hair that way. The problem with a North Idaho winter was that you had so few places to sneak away to, especially if your fellow sneaker wasn’t even twenty-one yet and redneck bars in the boonies weren’t an option.
A back road way out at the eastern end of the lake, though, with the truck’s motor running, the heater going, the windows fogging, and his body all the way over Beth’s on the cracked bench seat? That worked. That almost-last night,theirlast night, of her winter break, when she’d been wrapped up in his arms, her hair falling around her and all of her as smooth and rich as silk, and he’d slid a careful hand up under her shirt for the very first time?
Let’s just say he still remembered the feel of that high, firm breast, and the way she’d sucked in her breath when his fingers circled the erect little nipple. Which he knew would be a perfect shell-pink when he got to see it, and hewantedto see it. He wanted his mouth on it, too. He wanted to hear the noises she’d make then, because once Beth let go, she was all the way gone. He’d been right all along. Underneath all that careful reserve? She was fire.
They kissed and touched on that last night while the snow fell around the truck and the silence surrounded them, and he thought about getting stuck out there all night long, and wanted it. He knew her skin would be flushed and abraded from his kisses if only he could see it, and he wanted to see it. Her own increasingly bold hand was under his T-shirt, stroking up his body, grazing his chest, and he thought he’d explode just from that. His heart was beating like a jackhammer, he was hard enough to do damage to something, and he knew he’d be aching for hours. And he didn’t care.
What she said wasn’t exactly what he wanted to hear. She gasped out, while his mouth was at her neck, marking her up some more, “Evan. I want to . . . I want to so much. But I . . . I don’t think I . . . can.”
He sat back, but he kept his hands where they were. He wasn’t sure he could move them.
“I’m leaving the day after tomorrow,” she said, as if he would’ve forgotten. “And I want to do this, but I’m so . . . I think about you every night. I’m so . . . pulled, I can hardly stand it. I have too many . . . hormones.”
He had to laugh. “I’ve got some hormones myself.” He did move his hands, then, because even in the dark, he could sense how troubled she was. “Hey.” He brushed that gorgeous hair back, smiled as much as he could manage, ignored his aching body, and said, “If you don’t want to, we won’t.”
She leaned into him, then, laid her head against his shoulder, and said, “The problem is, that just makes me love you more.”
His hand stilled on her hair, then tightened around her, and she laughed into his shoulder and said, “Now I went and said the word. But if you can’t say the word, if you don’tfeelthe word—well, if I don’t, anyway—how can I even think of doing this?”
He said, gently, so she’d know it was safe to tell him, “Are you a virgin, baby? That what you’re telling me?”
He couldn’t believe it, not really. She was twenty, and she was so pretty. Oh. Wait. “Is it something else?” he asked as the cold dread filled him at the thought. “Did something happen to you that makes you not want to go ahead?” He’d kill the bastard. Even if the guy was all the way in Seattle. Didn’t matter.
“Option A,” she said with a sigh, still wrapped up tight in him, where he needed to keep her. “Embarrassing to admit, but you’d know as soon as we got going anyway, so I might as well tell you.”
Relief. And, yes, pleasure. He wanted to be her first. He wanted thatbad.“You know what I love about you?” he asked. She’d said the word first, so it was the least he could do. And never mind that it was too fast, and it was all wrong, and she was going to leave for Seattle again and he wasn’t even going to get to see her naked first.
