Page 25 of Over & Out (Redbeard Cove #3)

Hopper

I slip out without saying goodbye to anyone else. I’m a coward. And I drive home like one too.

But when I get through my gate, there’s another car in the driveway. A red Maserati.

I tell myself not to freak out. It’s been a long time since I had someone break into my place, but it’s happened. Maybe I left the gate open somehow when I left in a rush for the party.

I don’t freak out. But suddenly I get pissed.

I’ve found myself wishing I was just some regular guy a lot lately, which always brings me a ton of mixed feelings.

Because I’m lucky as fuck. There are people starving.

Working day and night at the kinds of jobs I would have had if I’d stayed in the small town where I grew up—at steel mills and manufacturing plants.

Coming home, backs broken. I have every material thing I could want.

But I don’t have privacy. I don’t have my own identity.

I’m a commodity—the person everyone else wants me to be.

The only one who doesn’t see me like that in one way or another, even if they care about me, is Chris.

I get out of my car and slam the door, making no secret that I’m home. It’s stupid of me to draw attention to myself. Mabel tells me I should carry a weapon. Or hire bodyguards. But I draw the line at all that shit. Plus I’ve never been great with listening to common sense.

As I approach the car, I see it’s empty, but the engine’s still ticking. When I press my hand to the hood, it’s warm. I peer in the windows. The car is neat as a pin. No wrappers, cups, or any of the other shit people leave in their cars.

A rental, I think, just as a voice says, “What took you so long?”

I whirl around, my heart thumping in a totally different way.

Chris stands to the side of my veranda. In the long shadows of early evening, she’s even more ethereal than she looked in the afternoon sun. My heart feels as buoyant as those balloons I almost lost. I want to see her there holding a cup of coffee, her head rumpled from sleep.

Bad; wrong , says my brain.

Good; right , says the rest of me.

“How the hell did you get here so fast?” I say, my words a little harder than I intended. “Never mind. I know how you drive.”

She looks slightly sheepish, which only makes my heart squeeze a little harder. “Tru gave me the gate code.”

“Good.”

She smiles, and for a moment, I try. I try one last time to shove these feelings down. I think desperately about things I could say. That I want to be alone. Tell her I need her to do something menial like polish my sneakers or take out the trash bins so she remembers she hates me.

But I could never. I would never. I don’t want to.

That firehose has grown. Now it’s a broken fire hydrant all the kids on the block come to play under.

“Do you want to come in?” I ask. “I mean, you should come in. I know we’re flying back tomorrow, but you should see the house. We’ll be back here next month, and I thought you might want to stay here instead of the hotel next time, since we’ll have those early morning calls…”

My stomach goes liquid at the thought of her staying in my house. Seeing her brush her teeth or padding around in bare feet.

“Maybe next time,” she says.

I try to ignore the little pain in my chest. The big pain. The one that should save me from making the biggest mistake of my life.

Chris holds up a small box. “I’m here because Tru forgot to give you this.”

My heart sinks. She’s not here for me.

I frown and walk up to the veranda. She must have been sitting in that chair, waiting for me. I wonder if it’s still warm from her. I won’t let anyone sit there ever again.

God, I’m pathetic.

I stop a few feet away from her, not trusting myself not to do something stupid.

Because looking at her in that dress, her face not filled with anger for me anymore but with a softness that makes my chest feel split right open, her lips so soft and pink, all I want to do is kiss her.

The urge is so great I feel my eyes focusing like a laser on those lips.

She takes a step forward and my breath catches. Does she feel it too? But when her hand reaches out, I realize it was only because I’m too far away to take the box. I hold my hand out. When Chris places the box in it, that slightest graze of her fingers makes my insides twang like a fucking banjo.

“Thanks,” I croak.

Get. The fuck. A hold of yourself.

I focus on the box. On Tru. That helps. The box is small, and when I flip it open, my throat goes thick.

What’s in there is a confirmation of what I already knew, but it still has me fighting back emotion.

Tru doesn’t think I’m an ass, either. Even though she saw right through me.

She knows what I’m feeling and she still doesn’t think I’m an asshole.

“What is it?” Chris asks.

“Cufflinks,” I tell her.

She frowns, like she knows there’s more to that. There is. But it’s slightly embarrassing to explain right now. She’ll find out soon enough anyway.

“Okay,” she says simply, not pressing.

I go to shove the box in my pocket, but find my phone’s in the way. I pull that out, and I must hit a side button, because Chris’s eyes drop to it. She blinks.

Then I remember my screen image. It’s the photo of her holding up that headshot she violated.

“It just…makes me smile,” I say gruffly, as if it’s the headshot I tap my phone to look at a hundred times a da y.

I shove my phone back into my pocket, then lean past her to set Tru’s gift on the arm of the chair Chris was sitting on.

Unfortunately, that gives me an intoxicating whiff of that lotion she uses on her hands.

The one I watch her glide all over her skin at my kitchen island or when she’s waiting for me in the car.

I think that’s what does it. That and the confirmation her presence here—and Tru’s gift—give me: that maybe I still deserve good things. Occasionally.

Then I meet Chris’s eyes. “You want to take a drive?”