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I let out a harsh breath. “Yeah, probably. Let’s get out of here before I lose it.”
“For once, I agree.”
“Can I just say—” Hugh began, but Cain turned to him.
“She’s already mad. Trust me, you don’t wanna make this worse.”
He huffed. “How do you know I’m gonna make it worse? All I was gonna say is that you should wipe the lipstick off your mouth before Jackie sees it.”
I turned to Cain with wide eyes; there were smudges of pink on his lips. He wiped it away, but I could feel his tension from where I was standing.
Yeah, it was time to go.
When we climbed in the truck, I was working out what to say if he didn’t talk the whole way home. Or what to do if he was so mad he started a fight.
He did neither.
“I’m sorry about Brooke.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“The woman you ran into outside of the bathroom.”
“You heard?”
“Yeah, I was about to walk out.”
I shrugged. “Don’t worry about her. She was all talk and no bite.”
“She wasn’t wrong, though.”
“About what?”
“Aboutme.”
I rolled my eyes. “She doesn’t even know you. The real you.”
“Mollie,youdidn’t know me years ago.”
I would have argued, but I remembered the feeling I had in the bathroom. The one that I didn’t know a damn thing about the man who’d just touched me. “Maybe you have a point.”
He glanced at me and then back at the road. “I wasn’t always like this. When I was younger, I was different.”
“As we all are. I used to be platinum blonde.”
Now he looked at me again. “I can’t see it.”
“For a reason. It wassobad for my coloring.”
“I wish all I was worried about when I was younger was just hair dye.” The words were bitter, but they weren’t directed at me.
“Bad childhood?” I asked.
“I bounced around foster homes. Jackie was the first that stuck.”
I blinked in shock. Jackie was his foster mom? That was how he knew her? “So, you were obviously going through a lot.”
“Her husband didn’t see it that way.”