Page 95 of Rock Chick

I waited for him to say more, to explain, but he didn’t.

So I waited some more.

Nothing.

“What does that mean, you lost control?” I whispered.

More nothing.

After a while, his fingers brushed my hair aside and his lips touched my nape.

I let it go at that and listened to his steady breathing. I knew he wasn’t asleep, and I also knew our talk was over. No way was Liam Nightingale going to admit, out loud, to being scared. That was as good as I was going to get.

And it was all I needed.

I let the tension go out of my body and settled into him, wriggling my bottom into his groin.

There was a time to hold a grudge.

This wasn’t that time.

TWELVE

I DID MY DUTY TO THE POT

Iwoke up when I felt the sheet go down my hip and a hand go up it.

I turned bleary eyes to Lee who was sitting, from what I could tell in the dawn’s early light, fully-clothed on the side of the bed.

“I need coffee,” I mumbled.

“You don’t have to get up. I’m just sayin’ good-bye,” he answered.

I blinked in the semi-darkness. “Where are you going?”

But I’d lost his attention. He was looking in the vicinity of my hips.

“Do you always wear underwear like this, or is it for me?”

I rolled to my back and pulled the sheet to my waist.

“It isn’t for you. I’ve been wearing underwear like this since Gram gave me my first Frederick’s of Hollywood box on my sixteenth birthday. Now I owe Victoria’s Secret my firstborn child.”

Before speaking again, Lee waited several seconds that can only be described as “loaded silence.” While this silence was going on, he pulled the sheet back down.

“You’re tellin’ me that since you were sixteen you’ve been sittin’ next to me every year at Christmas Dinner wearin’ underwear like this?”

I was having trouble processing all that was happening, seeing as it was oh-dark-hundred, Lee was dressed and leaving, and we were talking about my underwear.

Had I sat beside him at Christmas Dinner every year?

I had. At first because I finagled it, the last ten years by a cruel twist of fate.

“I didn’t sit by you,” I kind of lied.

“No,Isat byyou.”

At that unbelievable announcement, I got up on my two elbows and winced. Another learning experience: rolling around in bushes with your arms cuffed behind your back made you ache.

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