Page 126 of Thick as Thieves

“Because my ‘quickening’ took place a little lower than yours.”

“Here?” Her fingers tightened around him.

He squeezed his eyes shut and breathed out. “Yeah, there. I’d seen you, yeah, but I wasn’t ready for the stretchy t-shirt and blue jean skirt. I got instantly drive-a-nail hard. Scared the hell out of me.”

“So your rudeness was a defense mechanism against the sudden attraction?”

“Not the attraction itself, but the unlikelihood that anything could come of it.”

“If nothing was to come of it, you decided not even to bother being polite, but to act like a jerk instead.”

“Something like that, I guess.”

Pensively, she said, “That makes sense, because it didn’t take me long to recognize in you something I’ve often been cursed with.”

“What’s that?”

“Loneliness,” she whispered. “Your macho posturing made me mad. But I also came away thinking that underneath the tough-guy veneer, you were a lonely person, and that possibly your loneliness was self-imposed. I believe my intuition was right.”

She removed her hand from his cock and placed it on his thigh, just above his knee, and rubbed it tenderly. And somehow that caress was ten times more intimate than the other. She was comforting and consoling him.

Which God knew he didn’t deserve, and which she wouldn’t be doing if she knew how badly he was deceiving her. He couldn’t allow it. He lifted her hand from his leg and kissed the palm of it.

She touched his left biceps. “What’s this?”

He turned his arm so she could see the tattoo better in the dim light. She traced the familiar figure eight with her fingertip. “Why the infinity symbol?”

Even after she withdrew her finger, he continued to stare at the marking that held such meaning for him. “Whatever we do stays with us forever. We can’t shake it, can’t escape it. It’s eternal, there even after we die.”

She frowned. “Wait. Aren’t you the one who advised me to acknowledge the past, then to turn my back on it and move on?”

“I later said that was horseshit.”

But she wasn’t smiling at his quip. Her expression was serious and inquisitive. “What is it you can’t shake or escape, Ledge?”

Tell her. Tell her now.

He looked toward the window where their bourbons remained untouched on the sill. The ice cubes had melted.

Selfish bastard that he was, he wanted to indulge in a few more minutes of this interlude before shattering her opinion of him.

The rain continued to come down, but not as hard as before. He said, “I have an idea.”

“All right.”

“You don’t know what I have in mind.”

“Do I have to move?”

“Not much.”

He got off the bed and hiked on his jeans but didn’t bother buttoning them up all the way. In short order, he had Arden wrapped in the coverlet and was carrying her through the house and out onto the front porch, kept dry because of the overhang.

He settled into the rocking chair with her in his lap, his arms encircling her.

She squirmed a bit to snuggle closer against him. “Did you make this chair?”

“Few years ago.”