Page 41 of Colton's Secret Weapon
Damn. She’d given him a way out. But he had to know…
Staring at him, she held him to the only real fire she knew. The silent kind that couldn’t lie.
“I don’t want to have sex with you, Dove.”
She continued to hold his gaze. Breathing easily.
“Okay, I do. Quite fiercely, apparently. But I can’t take advantage of you that way. Or use you—”
“But it’s okay if I take advantage of you? Use you?”
He took yet another bite. Chewed. Swallowed. Repeated. Holding her gaze in a way that felt…easy. And that’s when she knew she had him. In a place of calm that one reaches through total honesty.
“Do we have a clear understanding thatifit were to happen, there’d be no strings attached? No expectations? And nothing weird between us after it was over?” She wasn’t going to let it go until she knew. Her own future depended on that one.
“We do,” he said clearly, succinctly. Confidently. Looking her straight in the eye.
And Dove stood, cleared her things off the table, put the leftovers in her bowl in the trash and the dirty dishes into the bag she’d brought from Mitchell’s house. She’d failed to bring dish detergent in with her that morning.
Mitchell emptied his bowl into his stomach. One bite at a time. Then stood and brought his bowl and fork to her. Holding it out but not letting go of it, he asked, “Are we on for tonight, then?”
And she dropped the bag she was holding.
Mitchell hadn’t seriously been planning to have sex with her. At least, most of him wasn’t. But if it did happen, which, given his behavior that morning along with her assertion of wanting him, was a good possibility, he was one hundred percent on board with her terms.
They were way too different to actually sustain a relationship. And he had zero desire to hurt her. But it made sense, her feeling as she did, given what he’d heard about her lifestyle. And had observed from afar himself.
So if they could give each other a little pleasure at some point, he saw no harm in that.
Kind of liking the way his uncharacteristic boldness had knocked her off her game enough for her to drop her bag, Mitchell had his mouth open, ready to tease her a bit more, when the stark fear in her suddenly widened eyes clued him in that she wasn’t looking at him.
Swinging around, he turned in the direction she was looking to see his cousin approaching the office. Her head and shoulders were visible through the small window beside Whaler’s desk. A window he’d known always to be covered with a drawn blind.
It hadn’t even registered that Dove had opened it until that moment.
Kansas was on site at St. James Boats.
She hadn’t called.
Dropping his lunch leftovers on the counter, Mitchell moved behind Dove. His hand at her back. Lightly. Professionally.
But most definitely there. They’d found Whaler.
And Kansas had shown up in person.
Without a smile, her step denoting purpose, she approached with tightly pulled back long dark hair behind firm shoulders, and a grim expression.
Clearly like the family notifications his cousin had shared with him over beer more times than either of them would have liked.
They took the wind out of his cousin every single time that Mitchell knew about.
“She was a year behind me in high school.” Dove’s words came at him out of nowhere. In that first instant, he was worried that he’d lost her. That she knew what was coming and had fallen into some kind of mental paralysis.
“I remember once when Jack Percy was giving me a hard time in the lunchroom. Kansas stepped right up to him and told him to back off.”
He hadn’t heard that story. But he wasn’t surprised to hear that the Percy kid had been a bully. Or that his cousin had come to the aid of one being persecuted.
He also hadn’t pegged Dove correctly. Rather than disappearing, she was finding something good to cling to in the face of gloom. How he knew that, he couldn’t say. Keen observation over a very intense few days, most likely.
