Page 49 of The Bronze Garza

Chapter Thirteen

“No. Questions.”

Lyra

I push the cart while hepicks the groceries.

I can’t remember ever doing my own grocery shopping. We have Gloria for that. When I tried to help him choose produce earlier, he put back everything I picked up and told me to “just push.” Apparently I wasn’t checking for “soft spots” or “browning.” Whatever that meant.

Torin is meticulous in choosing produce, examining them this way and that. I’d always been under the impression that men made terrible grocery shoppers. Guess not.

“You can keep fish down, right?” he asks when we’re in the poultry aisle. Him ahead, me trailing lazily behind.

I spy a woman further down the aisle staring at him while he dawdles by the seafood section, gazing down into the freezer, doing his super focused food-selection thing.

“Just salmon,” I answer, watching her quicken her steps up the aisle, her gaze never leaving him.

Once she’s close, her plump lips stretch into a sultry smile. “Tor?”

Torin glances up.

“Audrey,” he says in acknowledgment, flat and without inflection.

I can’t see his face, but I know he isn’t smiling. If this dark, beautiful, and enviably curvy woman knows him, then I doubt she was expecting him to, because Torin Garza is not a smiler.

Audrey abandons her cart in the middle of the aisle and crosses into his personal space, wrapping her arms around him. It’s not a familial or platonic hug, her hands are roaming all over his back.

Torin returns the hug, but it’s loose and detached.

“I didn’t know you were back,” she drawls. “You haven’t called.”

Torin pulls out of the hug, but Audrey keeps her hands on his biceps, slowly rubbing them up and down. Is she trying to warm him up? Or does she just really,reallylike his muscles?

“Yeah, just got back. Taking a break.”

“Well, will you be coming by now that you’re back?” she asks with a pout. “I miss you.”

“I’ll give you a call,” he replies noncommittally.

“Excuse me,” a stooped old man interrupts. “Whose cart is this? I would like to get by!”

Torin jerks his head, silently telling her to go.

Audrey squeezes his biceps one last time before stepping away. “Come by, okay?”

Torin grunts in response, then glances over his shoulder to me. “No. Questions.”

I hold my hands up to convey that I get it. But that’s only because I don’thaveany questions. I’m too busy trying to make sense of the strange feeling coursing under my skin. It’s ugly. Angry. Possessive. A feeling that growls in a harsh whisper to me that it doesn’t like that Audrey had her hands all over him. Touching him. All up in his space.

I’m trying to catch it, this feeling. To wrestle it into submission. But it’s frenetic, zapping me here, pricking me there. I don’t know what the hell is going on inside me right now.

One, I’m supposed to hate men. I shouldnotbe thinking about menat all. I’ve been trying to send that memo to my brain for almost two weeks now.

Two, I don’t likethisparticular man. That memo seems to have gotten lost in my brain mail as well.

Three, even if I did like him, he’s not mine. I shouldn’t care if someone else is touching him.

Four, even if I wanted him to be mine, he’d never have me. He knows too much. He knows itall. I might be bright and shiny here in L.A., but he knows the “Russia” me. He’sseenme. Used and debased. Virtue stripped. And that’s not something a man like him could ever get past.