Page 97 of Just Come Over
“Cheers,” Rhys said.
He bent and kissed Candy’s cheek, and she put her hand to it once he’d stepped back, laughed in a flustered way, and said, “Lovely to meet you.” After that, she kissed Zora and whispered in her ear, “Grab him,” then tucked her arm through Zora’s mum’s and said, “What a lovely dinner. I’m so glad you asked us.”
At least one of them was enthusiastic.
Rhys waited until the waiter had moved their table back over, until Zora had tucked her skirt under herself and sat down again, crossing her legs, one hand going to her hair, as if she could tame it. As if that were possible. Her cheeks were still wonderfully flushed, and she wasn’t quite looking at him. Instead, she was taking a bite of whitebait fritter, as if that were easier than the rest of it. Which was true.
“I love these,” she said with a sigh. “My mum’s horrified.”
“By whitebait?”
She smiled, finally, reluctantly, and lost a bit of her tension. “By everything. My slutty dress. My undisciplined body. My unrestrained dining choices. Your pearls, and the way I’m wearing them, like I’m advertising to the entire world exactly how much I want you.”
He was still reacting to that when she said, “And most of all... by you. The way you look tonight, so hard and so dark. The way you look at me. That you and I are out here for everyone to see. And you know what? I don’t care. Told her so, too.”
“Well,” he said, his tongue feeling too big for his mouth, “that’s good.”
She was starting to smile now. Getting her confidence back, maybe. The sway in her step, the fierce in her curvy body. “You know what I call unfair, though?” she asked him, and he thought,No, but I know what I do.She said, “How easily men get off the hook. All you had to do was show Candy that photo of Casey and the bunnies, be that sweet about her, and she was melting. She didn’t care about anything she’d heard about you, or that you’re sleeping with your brother’s widow. She cared about those muscles of yours, how you look in all that black, the dimple in your chin and the look in your eyes, and how you talked about your little girl.”
He said, “I know whatIcall unfair. Having to watch you eat oysters in front of your parents. Having to waste all this time when I was planning to make you feel beautiful, and to show off how much I wantyou.Have I mentioned that you knock me out?” He had hold of her hand, somehow, and was running his thumb over her knuckles. “I don’t give a damn what your mum thinks of your food choices. I know that I love the way you look in that dress, the way you wore my pearls down your back, and the way you bought the shoes I wanted. I love how soft and mussed your hair is right now, I love your gorgeous mouth, and I love your sweet body and every single thing it can do. And I want to take off your clothes right now.”
She shuddered, because she couldn’t do anything else. Long, slow, and rolling all the way through her, like a wave tumbling her, helpless, in the sea. His voice would never be smooth, and the edge of roughness only added to the thrill. He wasn’t smiling anymore, and now, the fires weren’t banked. He said, “Yeh. That’s it. That’s what I want. Tell me what you’re wearing under that. Whisper it in my ear. Get me through this dinner.”
She’d never been a woman who made a man’s breath catch, but she was that woman tonight. She said, “I’ve been wanting to tell you that all night. It’s all I want. But first, I need to tell you something else. Something I told my mum.”
“Did I mention,” he said, “that I’m feeling a bit tired of your parents?”
She had to laugh, and to drink some more wine, which made her realize exactly how good it was, bursting with dark fruit and exotic spices, with veins of chocolate, tobacco, and smoke running through all of it. She took another bite of fritter, too, savoring its richness and the lemony sauce, and Rhys said, “And now I’d say you’re stalling. If you need to tell me—tell me. Just don’t tell me that thing again about how it’s once, and then we’re done. It’s not once. It’s never going to be once.”
She had a hand on her heart, because it was racing. She waited to be able to breathe again, but it wasn’t getting better, so she just said it. “Right. Here I go, then, because I need to say it. I hated that I couldn’t tell my parents the truth about you. That I couldn’t explain that you didn’t cheat on Victoria, and exactly why and how you lied, and who you were protecting when you did it. I wanted to tell my mum that you took Casey when you didn’t have to, and I wanted to tell her all about the man you are underneath that scary surface. And it hit me so hard to realize. It knocked me flat. I keep thinking about how you make my knees weak, how much I want to feel you kiss me, but it’s so much more than that. It’s how much I admire the man you are. How far you’ve brought yourself, how hard you’ve worked, and then how much harder, every time you think you’ve fallen short. How hard you are on yourself, and what that says about you. And maybe I realized how much trouble I’m in, too. The way I nearly stumble when I’m around you, because my feet stop working and I lose my train of thought. The way I feel when you look at me in the kitchen, when all I want is for you to put your hand on my waist and lean over and kiss me, and dance me around the room, just because you want to hold me. The way I need you, like it’s an addiction. The way I... love you. That’s the main thing I realized, and it’s the scariest thing of all.”
The words fell out, and they took her breath with them. Across from her, Rhys was frozen, his eyes locked on her. She said, “Maybe this is an...” Her voice trembled, and she could no more help it than she could help going on. “An affair, and I don’t know how to do an affair. If it’s that, if it’s a... a hookup, or—a series of hookups, whatever you call that, because I don’t even know—I don’t have any ammunition for that. I don’t have any armor. So if it’s that? Could you... could you tell me, so I can try to stop? Because right now, I’m so far gone, it scares me.”
“Zora. Stop.” He’d put his hand over her mouth, straight across the table. The couple next to them was looking over. Zora could see it, and she couldn’t care. Rhys took his hand away, brushed the back of it over her cheek, and said, that edge of roughness still there in his voice, but so much warmth in his eyes, “Don’t you remember, baby, that I already said it? I’ve already jumped in. I’m right here, ready to catch you, and I’m one hell of a swimmer. I’m not going to let you go.”
“I...” Her hand was shaking on her fork. Too many emotions tonight, and no defenses left. Her heart was laid bare, and her blood felt too hot in her head, like she could actually feel it pulsing at her throat, her temples. She had nothing to cover herself with, not anymore. “I didn’t know if you... if you meant it that way.”
“I meant it that way. You’re my Bathsheba, you always have been, and I need you like a needle in my vein. I don’t care about right or wrong, or maybe that’s not it. It’s that I can’t see how my feelings for you could possibly be wrong.”
It was so hard to believe in him, but he was asking her to believe anyway. “This scares me so much.” She tried to laugh, and couldn’t. “I’d run away, but I can’t.”
“You don’t need to be scared. Not while I’m here.”
Surely, no man’s voice had ever carried such assurance, or such tenderness. “And you won’t lie to me?” she asked. “Please, Rhys. Promise me. I can hear the truth. I cantakethe truth, no matter how hard it is. I’ve done it so many times. I can’t take any more lies, though. I can’t.”
She didn’t cry in front of people, but she was holding Rhys’s hand across a table in front of too many curious eyes, and the tears were right there on the edge of her lashes. One of them trembled there, a drop of silver at the edge of her vision, and she felt it travel slowly down her cheek, warm and wet, and more of them came after it. She sobbed once, pressed her serviette to her mouth, and tried to stop.
Rhys’s thumbs came up and wiped the tears away, and his voice was gentle when he said, “I’ll never lie to you. You have my word.”
“And your word’s...” She tried to get herself steady again, and failed. “Good.”
She asked him with her eyes, and he answered.
“Always.”
He asked the server to put their steaks and sides in a box. He asked for the chocolate fondant, too, and he took the rest of the wine. And then he took Zora home.
Twenty-five minutes once again. The middle-aged woman behind the wheel was Maori, cheerful, and not chatty. Of course, maybe that was because she’d seen his face. She asked him, when she’d swung the car around a corner and onto the quiet, dark streets of Herne Bay, “Would you like music?”
