Page 33 of Slide
Chapter Eight
Saturday Afternoon
“What’s my car doing here?” Bella asked, stepping out from beneath the awning of the flower shop.
Her wide eyes made him grin and the sunshine glinting off her auburn hair made him itch to wrap the strands around his hands and tug her close. “It’s finished,” Travis said.
“Travis, I—” Her eyes darkened in the afternoon sun and something niggled at him.
“I know you’ll pay me when you can, Bells,” he rushed to reassure her. He wanted the car out from between them. Their affair hadn’t had anything to do with her car after that first kiss on her porch. At least not for him, though that hadn’t stopped him from reminding her that it had.
“Is that why you’ve been leaving in the middle of the night? Why you wouldn’t spend the night with me? Is that when you were fixing my car?”
“Yeah. Look, I wanted you bad, baby, and I knew you wanted me too. I—”
“I did want you. You were the one guy I wasn’t supposed to ever have.”
“But you have had me.”
“I have—and I’m not done with you.”
“You don’t have to do this. I was wrong. I shouldn’t have made you sleep with me to get your car fixed cheaper. I would have worked with you on it, no matter what. I—”
“We’ve got to stop interrupting each other,” she quipped. “Travis, do you want to keep seeing me?”
He hadn’t expected her to ask. Or could be he’d hoped she would. “Hell, baby, yeah. I do.”
“Then shut up. I have some things to say, and a proposal to make, but I can’t do it if you keep feeling bad about what we’ve been doing for two and a half days.”
“Now c’mon. I don’t feel bad about what we’ve done. Only how I got you to agree to it.”
“You didn’t get me to agree to anything. I told you I didn’t care. I’d take you any way I could get you. I asked at the shop for time because that’s what it was going to take to get that kind of cash together. I said yes to sleeping with you under the pretense of payment knowing I could get you the money.”
She turned the tables and stunned him. “What?”
“Yeah.”
Even in the summer heat, she blushed. Pink lit her cheeks and she glanced away from him. The little minx. “Tell me.”
She sighed and locked gazes with him again. “Long story short, I have money. I have a small trust fund and a little savings. My accountant put safeguards and security measures into place when things came to a head with Artie. It was only for emergencies, for my future, for my children. It was all I had left. I didn’t lose as much as others, but Artie took something so much more valuable from me. He ruined my family name and my legacy. But then …” She smiled all soft and gentle and his heart flipped over. “Then you came along looking for something else, offering something more.”
“Shit, baby. I—”
“I swear, Travis. If you say you’re sorry one more time, I’m going to come over there and kick you. Not another apology. Not another anything until you listen to everything I’ve got to say. Understand?”
He nodded and she grinned. Truth be told, he couldn’t have formed any other words if he’d had to. She had him by the balls and he loved it. He couldn’t wait to hear what else she had to say, but no matter what it was, he wanted her. Not her money, not her name. Her.
“I want to keep fucking you, Travis.” Her grin widened when his jaw dropped. Of all the words in the world … “I want to keep seeing you, but I didn’t want my car repair hanging over our heads. Before I could make arrangements with my bank, though, Mrs. Cleary informed me of some other things. Some important things. Some life-changing things.”
“Mrs. Cleary is part of this?” Confusion clouded his voice and vision. What was she trying to say? He felt the muscles of his face pinch and scrunch as he tried to follow her line of conversation.
“She is,” Bella affirmed. “I know I should have told you when I found out a couple days ago. I … I didn’t want things to end before I was ready and if I’d said something, you might have wanted to stop. Only … only I ’m not ready for our arrangement to end and I was afraid if you knew—
“Knew what?” he interrupted, still stuck.
“My mother invested in the flower shop. When the business made the initial investment back and more, Mrs. Cleary tried to pay my mother back. Only she wouldn’t take it and signed her part of the shop over. Mrs. Cleary never filed the paperwork and put the money in an account. My mother remained a silent partner until she died. Mrs. Cleary transferred the partnership to me with the option of being a full partner. Not the investment partner. Not a silent partner. A full partner with say so. Said it was only right.”
Bella could hardly contain her excitement and Travis was still trying to keep up. “You own half the shop?” A slight breeze could’ve knocked him over, he was so shocked at the turn of events in Bella’s life.
