“I’m just trying to get to know you better.”
“But why? You’re not long-term, remember?”
“Hello, pot,” he said softly. “Meet kettle.”
She stared into his eyes. “Not fair.”
“No?” He leaned forward, intent and focused on her. “Then tell me why everyone and everything else in this town is allowed to take up residence in your fold, but you keep me out.”
“You didn’t want in, remember?”
“Christ.” He sat back, his expression suggesting that maybe she was being an unfathomable pain in his ass.
Which was true. She was being a pain. It was called fear. Because she decided right then and there that she was absolutely not going to let herself ruin what very well might be one of the last few nights she had with him. No regrets, she reminded herself. Not ever again.
They left the restaurant in silence.
Normally that was Brady’s favorite state of being but not tonight. Tonight he needed more.
And it pissed him off.
He opened the door to the truck and went to help Lilah in, but she gave him a long look and he lifted his hands in surrender, backing up to watch her struggle one-handedly.
“Goddammit,” he breathed when she winced in pain from tweaking her still healing arm, and gave her a boost.
When he walked around and angled into the driver’s seat, he felt her hand settle on his arm.
“Thank you.”
Turning toward her, he stroked a strand of hair from her face. “For letting you hurt yourself trying to get into the truck?”
“For letting me be as stubborn as… well, you. Turn left,” she said when he would have turned right to take her home.
He turned left and ended up at the convenience store.
“Wait here,” she demanded.
He arched a brow.
“Please,” she added so sweetly that he shook his head and did what she asked. She vanished inside, only to come back five minutes later with a brown bag and a smile.
“Ian was inside,” she said. “He says if you strike out tonight, I’m to call him.”
“Good to know,” he said, wondering if he was going to indeed strike out. He reached for the bag.
“Nope,” she said, holding it out of his way. “Surprise. Go straight.”
He went straight.
“Now right again.”
He slid her a glance, but in the dark of the night he couldn’t see her expression. “Finally decided to take me to some remote area to off me?”
Her soft laugh was a balm to the soul he hadn’t realized was aching. “You afraid of me, Brady?”
More than you know. “Should I be?”
She was quiet a moment. Then she let out a soft “yes.”
Twenty-One
L ilah took Brady to the lake, his earlier words echoing in her head.
You’re awfully closemouthed about your hopes and dreams.
You let me into your body but not into your head.
I’m just trying to get to know you better.
The night was balmy, with a nearly full moon, and aware as she had been all week that her time with him was winding down, she took his hand, wanting to lose herself in him, wanting to feel connected.
They walked to the water’s edge, sitting there, absorbing the night. The soft breeze rustling the hundred-foot pines. The distant cry of something looking for its mate. The water lapping near their feet.
He was right, she had held back. Big-time. She’d done so out of self-preservation, but that didn’t make it okay. If she was going to have no regrets, she needed to be fearless. Because no way was she going to be the woman who couldn’t-or wouldn’t-let herself love.
She pulled the bottle of whiskey out of the bag and made him laugh softly. God, she loved making him laugh. He didn’t do it often, but when he did it was a beautiful sound.
She went back into the bag for her second item-a deck of cards.
“Strip poker?” he asked hopefully.
She showed him that they weren’t regular playing cards but the game Uno. “It’s all they had.” She shuffled and dealt, then took a swig of the whiskey and offered the bottle to Brady.
Eyes on hers, he tossed back a swallow, then smiled because she was still coughing. “So, you do this a lot,” he said.
She laughed and picked up her cards. They played a round and she lost. She set down the cards.
“Strip Uno?” he asked this time, still hopeful.
When she smiled, Brady knew he wasn’t going to get to see her strip.
“Something not quite as fun as stripping,” she said. “But I hope you’ll like it.” She hesitated. “I’m going to tell you something about me.”
He was surprised by this.
Lit by the glow of the moon playing off the water, she smiled at his expression. “I know, brace yourself. Are you ready?”
“Hit me,” he said.
“I grew up out here.”
“I already knew that.” He eyed her sundress, knowing she wore only a pair of skimpy, mind-blowing panties beneath-which meant that he could have had her naked in two rounds of Strip Uno.
“Yes, but you didn’t know that I grew up poor as dirt.”
He stopped thinking about Strip Uno and met her gaze. “I guessed.”
She nodded. “Of course at the time, I had no idea we were that bad off,” she said. “My grandma never let on. She took on odds jobs like cleaning houses and sewing, taking me with her so I wouldn’t be alone. She’d pretend we were going on a grand adventure, and I believed her until in second grade, when John Dayley told me I was poor white trash.”
Brady’s chest tightened, for her grandma, for the little girl she’d been.
Laughing a little, she shook her head. “I didn’t even know what white trash meant,” she said, not nearly as bothered as he. “When I got home, I asked my grandma and she said it meant that we were special. The next weekend she took me to the circus. One of her cleaning clients had left her the tickets. It was”-she closed her eyes and smiled in fond memory-“amazing. I wanted to be a circus ring leader. I wanted to grow up and have all those animals around me, and I wanted to take care of them.” She paused, glancing at him to make sure he wasn’t going to laugh.
But that ache in his chest had spread now, and he didn’t feel much like laughing.
“It was my first personal goal for myself,” she said quietly, hitting him with those mossy green depths that he could jump into and never come up for air.
He smiled past a tight throat. “I like it.”
They took another shot of whiskey each and played a second round. He lost, but only because he forgot to say Uno. Lilah looked at him expectantly.
“I’d rather strip,” he said.
“Don’t tempt me. Talk. Tell me something about you. Something about when you were young.”
He found it far easier than he could have imagined, which was no doubt thanks to the whiskey. “I was a punk-ass teenager when I landed at Sol’s, and pissed off at the world.” God, so pissed off. Even now he could remember the anger burning through him at every turn. “I’d just gone through a few different foster homes, each nicer than the last, and for various reasons, I didn’t get to stay at any of them.”
And he’d wanted to. Stay. He’d wanted a place where he belonged to someone.
“Why couldn’t you stay?” she asked.
He shrugged, able to once again feel that bone-deep helplessness at not being in charge of his own fate. He’d been through some hairy shit in his life, especially in the army rangers, where too many times to count death had been a certainty, and yet nothing had been worse than that helplessness he could still practically taste. “The first couple that took me in ended up getting pregnant, and she got too sick to care for a kid, even a nearly grown one.”
“Oh, Brady,” she said softly.
“The second family had four daughters of their own already. They’d requested a girl, and when one came along, they traded me in.”