I stuff my hands in my pockets and rock back on my heels. “I figured that was probably off, considering …”
She plants her fists on her hips and scowls the sexiest scowl I’ve ever seen. “Considering what?”
Considering all I can think about every waking minute is fucking you senseless. Considering all your fears about me are true. Considering I’m probably not sticking around.
Take your pick.
I haul a deep breath, shoving my hands deeper into my pockets. “This isn’t going to work, Adri. I’m not the guy you want me to be. I’m exactly the guy you think I am. There’s a reason Sherm is scared of me. You should be too. I’m not a good person.”
She takes a step closer. “I don’t believe you.”
I back up and tip my head at her. “Smart, because I’m also a pathological liar, but in this rare instance I’m telling the truth.”
She steps closer again and her face twists. “You smell like cigarettes. Where were you?”
“Working.”
“The bodyguard thing?”
I nod.
Her expression takes on a cynical edge as her gaze courses over my T-shirt and jeans, but there’s also an unmistakable flash of jealousy in those baby blues. “You’re not dressed for that.”
I remember what she saw in the waiting room of the ER, and the reason for the inquisition clicks. She thinks I was with Candy.
“Was just casing for a gig next Saturday. We’re not in uniform for that.”
She takes another step closer. This time I don’t back up. “Do you smoke?”
“No.”
“Drugs?”
I tip my head at her. “Why?”
She gets all defiant, and that look stirs something deep in my gut. “I want to know.”
“There are a lot of things about me you don’t know. Drugs are the least of your worries.”
She moves again and she’s right in front of me. The gentle breeze lifts her hair. The ends brush against my arm, doing things to me that I can’t explain and I’m not sure I like.
“Then tell me,” she says. She lifts a hand, strokes her fingers along the line of my jaw.
I draw a shaky breath. “You don’t want anything to do with me, Adri.”
“You’re wrong.” Her voice is breathy.
When her fingers thread behind my neck, even though I should, I don’t resist as she pulls me into a kiss. Her mouth is warm and inviting. Her kiss makes me want to dive right into her.
I pull away, gaze down into her moonlit eyes. She’s this beautiful, perfect thing. All I can do is leave greasy black smudges all over her. But that honesty, the way she trusts, it makes me want to try to be a better person for her.
I step on the heels of my boots and kick them off. “Come on,” I say, turning for the bluff.
We skirt past the house. I curse under my breath and move faster, when I hear Crash bark from inside. In the moonlight, it’s easy to see as we pick our way down the path to the beach.
She stops halfway down, looks out over the ocean, rolling gently onto the beach tonight. “When I was a kid, we used to tell ghost stories about the fisherman and his wife who lived in your house. It was our local legend.”
“How does it go?”
She turns to me. “The fisherman was lost at sea, and his widow was so distraught that she threw herself off the bluff into the ocean below. But it turned out the fisherman was only stranded, and when he was rescued and came home, he found out his wife was dead and boarded himself up in the widow’s walk, where he died of a broken heart,” she says, pointing up the bluff to my perch atop our house.
“Not to mention starvation,” I say with a smirk.
She huffs a laugh. “The story goes that both their spirits haunt the house and the bluff, looking for each other, but they always just miss, never finding each other. And when the wind blows off the water, you can hear her wails from the ocean and his howls of anguish from the widow’s walk as she plunges off the bluff over and over and over again.”
“Tragic.” I turn and make my way to the beach.
“You don’t believe it—that people could be so in love that they couldn’t live without each other?” she asks as she follows.
Pop essentially died that night on the street with my mother. The person living in his body isn’t the same one who loved her. So, yeah, I believe it. “If they loved each other that much, wouldn’t they have found their way to each other in the afterlife?”
“Have you heard any wailing or howling?” she asks, amusement in her voice.
“No.”
“So maybe they did, and that part of the story is bullshit,” she says as we step onto the sand. She touches my arm. I turn to face her. “What’s haunting you, Rob?”
“Everything.”
She lifts a hand and traces the lines of my face with the tip of her index finger. I can’t breathe. “Let me help you.”
She takes my hand. We move slowly down the beach without talking. When we reach a wider stretch of beach where the sand is dry, she sits and pulls me down next to her.
“I’m your standard small-town girl,” she says, crossing her ankles and leaning back on her hands, looking out over the rolling surf. “I played with Barbie when I was little, and she and Ken always got married and lived happily ever after. I dreamed of Prince Charming and how he’d show up here, sweep me off my feet, and love me forever.” She turns to me. “But I’m all grown up now, and I get that there are no fairy tales. I’m not asking for that, Rob. All I want from you is whatever you’re willing to give me. If that’s just today … right now … I’d be okay with that. But I wish you could see what I see when I look at you. You want to think you’re some horrible person, but I see how much you love your family. I see that you’d do anything for Sherm. I don’t know what’s happened to you to make you so jaded, but if you could just let down your guard for, like, one minute, you’d see that the whole world’s not out to get you.”
Christ, I wish that were true. All my guts are churning acid, eating me alive from the inside out. I lie back in the sand, stare up at the blanket of stars. Damn her for seeing so much. And damn her for making me feel too much.
I close my eyes because I can’t look into hers and say this. “I killed a man with my bare hands, Adri, so that pretty much shoots your latent good guy theory straight to hell.”
There’s a gasp, then nothing. I don’t look when I hear a rustle in the sand, because it will kill me to see her walking away.
Chapter 20
Adri
Shock courses through my body on a jolt of electricity, contracting every muscle in a wave and forcing the air from my lungs. Dad was right. My instincts totally let me down.
But in the time it takes me to catch my breath, I realize he just told me of his own volition. He tried to lighten the blow, but he’s finally doing what I’ve been begging him to do. He’s opening up to me.
Chuck has killed people too, and I don’t love him any less. I’ve watched them both struggle with what they’ve done and try to cope with it in their own way.
It takes me a second to find my voice. Dread sits like a stone in my stomach as I open my mouth, but I need to know. “What happened?”
He opens his eyes and turns his tortured gaze from the sky to me. “I grabbed him from behind and snapped his neck.”
Again, hearing his words sends a physical jolt through me. He seems almost callous about it, but I can see in his eyes that it’s killing him inside. “But … there has to be a reason.”
“Not for a guy like me.”
There was a time, when we first met, that I was afraid of Rob. Now I feel the threads of it trying to force their way into my heart. But even though he’s never totally opened up to me until now, I got to know him—his soul—and I know, despite what he’s saying, he’s not evil.
I press up and plant a hand in the sand on either side of his head, staring down into his surprised eyes. “Stop it.”
“Stop what?�
�
“Trying to scare me away.”
He props up on his elbows and his gaze hardens. “You asked me to tell you what happened, and I did. Are you saying you don’t believe me?”
Our faces are an inch apart, but I don’t back away. I need him to hear me. “I believe you killed someone. It explains a lot. But I don’t believe you did it for no reason.”
The ice in his gaze melts into pools of molten anguish, and I see it clearly. This is the thing that has tortured him for so long. “I’d do it again if I had to. It was him or us. I chose him.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
He doesn’t move a muscle as I drop soft kisses at the corner of his mouth. My lips glide along the angle of his jaw to his ear, where I drop another kiss. “You’re not evil,” I whisper. “You’re not bad. You did what you needed to do to protect your family and that makes you incredibly brave, and strong, and—”
He cuts me off cold when he grabs a fistful of my hair and crushes his mouth to mine. His kiss is angry and raw and frightened. I want to be his lifeline—to pull him out of the dark pit he’s living in and help him see the light inside him—so I let him devour me, because that’s what he needs right now. After a few minutes, his kisses become less ravenous. His hold on my hair softens and he draws away.
Neither of us says anything for a long time, but finally, he sits and rests his forearms on his bent knees, hanging his head between them. “You’re too trusting, Adri. Someone is going to destroy you, and I couldn’t live with myself if it was me.”
I lift his chin and hold him in my gaze. “You know why? Because you’re not the horrible person you think you are. That guy would have taken advantage of me without blinking an eye when I threw myself at him. That guy wouldn’t be forever beating himself up for all the unforgivable things he thinks he’s done. That guy wouldn’t bring his little brother to and from school every day, desperate to make up for whatever happened between them.” I lean forward and kiss him softly on his kiss-swollen lips.
His eyes glisten as he stares out over the water. “He saw it. He watched me snap that guy’s neck.”
“Sherm?”
His nod is almost imperceptible. “He’ll never be able to see me as anything but a monster.”
“You’re not a monster, Rob. You’re not that guy.”
Anger flares in his eyes. “Why are you so sure of that? Maybe I’m exactly that guy.”
“Call it a sixth sense, but I’m pretty good at reading people.”
The anger fades and those deep honey eyes search mine. “You can’t be real. People like you don’t exist.”
“People like me?” I ask, confused.
“You’re just so damn good. So trusting. How have you gotten through life without someone killing that part of you?”
The pain thickening his voice when he says it tells me he’s speaking from personal experience, and my heart aches for him, wondering what he’s been through to get him here. “I’m sorry for whatever happened to you … that someone hurt you and destroyed your ability to trust. But you can trust me, Rob. Don’t be afraid of me.”
He turns his head and stares over the water. “So if we’re going to do this thing, how is it going to work?”
The tingle in my belly at his question is followed instantly by a cramp that nearly doubles me over.
Dad.
I don’t know all the ins and outs of Rob’s situation—whether he killed that man during a robbery, or a carjacking or what—but Chuck is right. Dad’s already asking questions. He’ll rake Rob over the coals if he thinks there’s anything between us. There’s no way I can tell Dad I’m falling in love with Rob until I know more about what happened so I can do some damage control. Maybe in a few weeks, if Rob opens up to me a little more, I’ll be able to tell Dad. But not now.
“I think we just need to take things slow … for now.”
The hint of a smile tugs at his mouth. “I wasn’t the one moving at the speed of light.”
I sigh and know I’m blushing. “I just think you and me all up in the faces of the school board probably won’t help my cause. I’m hoping to get hired permanently. In a few months, at the end of the school year, Sherm won’t be my student anymore, so it shouldn’t be an issue.”
He stands and holds his hand out to me. “Sorry I ruined our first date.”
I take it and he pulls me up like I weigh nothing. “This doesn’t feel ruined to me … unless you’re going to confess you were really out with Candy Girl earlier.”
His grip tightens on my hand and we start back toward Widow’s Leap. “Never gonna happen.”
We climb the bluff and he walks me back to my car, where he kisses me good night. It’s sweet and slow and I sink into it, feeling it all the way to my toes. And, God, I wish we weren’t taking it slow.
*
Rob is the first guy I’ve been serious about since Mom died. Even when I was away at college, I never kept anything from her. I knew she never kept anything from Dad. So, in a roundabout way, I never kept anything from Dad. With the other guys I dated, Mom was the buffer. I’ve never had to tell Dad directly that I was seeing someone. But Mom is gone. There’s no buffer this time.
I listen to him snoring through the wall and remember how he was with the only other guy I dated long enough to meet my parents. Trey was a criminology major and wanted to go into law enforcement. He and Dad had a ton in common. But Dad was so overprotective he never gave Trey a chance.
I’m pretty sure Rob is going to give Dad a coronary.
I’m pretty sure Rob is going to give me a coronary.
I might have been going at the speed of light, but it’s only because every time he touches me my whole body lights up. It’s like he’s electricity and I’m the bulb. I was serious when I told him I’m not expecting a fairy tale. Rob doesn’t strike me as a fairy-tale kind of guy. But there’s one thing I’m sure of. Rob is going to be The One.
Is that something you tell a man? That he’s your first? I’m twenty-three. My high school was a regular Melrose Place. No one made it out of there a virgin. No one but me, that is. I guess Chuck had something to do with that, though I didn’t know it at the time. There were three guys I dated at Clemson, but none of them ever lit me up the way Rob does. I didn’t know what I was waiting for, but now I do.
Passion.
Rob.
But we’re taking it slow.
I glide a hand under my nightshirt to my breast, remembering the way his mouth felt on me. It was one of the most erotic experiences of my life. I want to feel it again. Right now.
Damn.
I pick up my phone and look at the time. Twelve seventeen.
I bring up his number and type in, Are you awake? My finger hovers over Send, but I can’t make myself push it. I set it back on my nightstand. It’s not even out of my hand yet when it vibrates.
I panic for a second, thinking I hit Send by accident, and when I look at the screen, above my unsent text is this: You awake?
I backspace away my original text and type, Yes.
Thinking of you, comes back as soon as I hit Send.
Me too, I text, then realize how that sounded and add, about you.
The taking it slow thing. Any flexibility there?
A pulsing ache between my legs starts keeping time with my pounding heart.
Maybe.
Good, because I’m thinking of you and doing unspeakable things to myself.
“Oh my God!” I hiss into the dark. I like it when you talk dirty.
You ain’t heard nothing yet. Wait till I start speaking those unspeakable things.
I’m already out of bed. I want to see you. Where can we meet?
Nothing comes back for long enough that I’m afraid I scared him off, but then. Park where you parked earlier and meet me on the beach.
I’ll be there in twenty.
Oh, God. I’m totally on fire just thinking about it. I tug off my nightshirt as I tiptoe to my dresser. I shaved for our
date, and I’m still in the sexy lace thong I picked out with him in mind. I forgo the bra, because I’m pretty sure it’s coming off anyway, and slip into a cotton skirt and a loose sweatshirt, then pull my hair back and secure it in a clip.
The back door hinges creak as I open it and slip out into the cool night. I pause at the T-Bird, waiting to see if I woke Dad. Then I pause longer.
Mom’s car. Is this something I’m willing to do? It feels like sullying her memory to use her car for a clandestine meeting where I’m fairly certain depraved sex acts are imminent. Goddamn Frank! How could he let me down like this?
I look at the key in my hand. Click the lock. Slide inside. “Okay, Mom?”
No answer. As usual.
A thread of anger weaves into my typical disappointment and I crank the engine. I’m not sure if I’m angry at myself for expecting anything, or at her, but either way, I need to get past whatever stupid fixation I have about this car.
I speed across town, safe in the knowledge that the chief of police is home in bed. Ten minutes later, I’m skidding to a stop at the end of Rob’s driveway.
I skitter around the house and to the trailhead at the top of the bluff, thinking he might meet me there. He’s nowhere in sight. I wait for a minute, but I’m totally dying of anticipation, so I skip down the winding path to the thin swath of sand below.
In the moonlight, I see him, on the beach where we sat earlier. He’s bare-chested in loose black sweatpants that ride low on his hips. There’s a candle in the sand at his feet. Seeing him standing there, it hits me. We both know why I came back. It’s really going to happen.
I catch my tongue before it slips over my lower lip, but I do wipe my suddenly sweaty palms on my skirt.
He’s watching me, waiting for me to come to him. I force my feet to move and half walk, half stumble through the sand toward him. As I get closer, I see it’s more than a candle at his feet. There’s a hurricane lamp set at the corner of a makeshift bed, several blankets arranged on the sand with a pillow.
“Hi,” he says when I stop a few feet away.
“Hi.”
Without another word, I’m in his arms. He kisses me as if I’m his beginning and his end, and any lingering doubt that he doesn’t want me or that I’m not ready vanishes into the fine sea mist all around us.
Outside the Lines Page 20