Luke took an order from the adorable blonde who’d been manhandled by Red Suit. Clearly interested in more than a rum and Coke, her face fell when his brother didn’t respond to her overt flirting. With his divorce recently finalized, Luke had yet to reach the bang-his-way-out-of-his-misery step. It would come.
Beck remembered it well.
Gin and tonics in hand, he ambled over to the side of the bar, frowning when he found no sign of Darcy. Her coat still hung on the hook but her boot was gone. Darcy’s friend was groping the bicep of Jacob Scott, one of Beck’s coworkers on the truck, but paused to thumb over her shoulder. “Little leprechaunette’s room.”
“Think I’ll take that break now,” he said to Luke, who smirked at that.
Smug bastard.
“Sure, Becky. Take all the time you need.”
Not even Luke’s use of the girly nickname Beck had been plagued with as a kid could quell the anticipation thrumming through him. Sort of like the energy sparking his blood before a run or a fight. He didn’t want to punch anyone, but he wouldn’t say no to stoking a fire. First, though, he wanted to talk more. Find out what she’d been up to all these years.
And touch her. Definitely touch her.
He found her in the corridor heading to the restrooms, and covertly he watched as she tentatively tested out her ankle with brief stops to flex her foot. Satisfied she was back in business, she leaned her back against the wall, and he took a blessed moment to admire the curved wave of her body as she texted on her phone with quick, supple fingers. He used to love how fast those fingers moved, creating portraits in charcoal, quick sketches that she would later develop into masterpieces. It was their only communication during that first year of nonversation. She, trying to capture his mood while he sat in her family’s den. He, biding his time, scheming to capture her heart.
“How’s the ankle?”
She lifted her tilty-green gaze, but there was no surprise at seeing him. “I’ll live.”
He stared, the need in him rising more quickly than expected as every cell in his body clamored for action and release. A fiery blush crept up her neck. When the sweep of heat tagged her cheekbones, she made a disgruntled noise in the back of her throat, and knowing he still had that effect on her had his dick at attention in an instant.
“Some things don’t change, I see,” she said as she slipped her phone into a purse slung over her shoulder. “You’ve not become a sparkling conversationalist in the intervening years, Beck.”
“We never needed to talk, princesa.”
Man, how she used to hate that endearment, though in days past, using it had sparked some of their most pleasurable moments together. He would goad her until her cheeks flushed and his cock swelled and relief could only come from sinking his fingers in her hair, her mouth, her slick-for-him sex.
Now, on a razor’s edge, the moment lived, then deflated when she gave him a nervy smile. She looked unsure, vulnerable, not at all like the girl he knew.
“What are you up to these days?” he asked.
Thoughts ran circles over her face as she geared up to . . . huh. Lie her sweet ass off.
“This and that. Mostly helping with Grams’s recovery and organizing the charity fund-raiser for the homeless she hosts each year. Big party in a couple of weeks.”
Maybe this was a boyfriend or that was a husband.
“How’s Preston Collins III?”
Her composure took another hit, but on the beat of three she picked herself right back up and smoothed her expression to a cool slate.
“I’ve no idea.”
“So your marriage didn’t work out?”
“I never got married. That was something my father wanted, not me.”
There was no time to enjoy the sweet balm of relief those words created in his chest. Something else was going on here, a restlessness about her that matched his own edgy mood. The tell in her eyes piqued his interest. Time to double down.
“So how mad at me are you right now?”
She sucked in a breath. “Mad? At you? Why would I be mad at you?”
“Oh, I dunno.” Because he had dropped her like a bad habit. “You seem uncomfortable at seeing me again. Pissy.”
“Beck,” she said in the tone of one about to explain something to a dimwit. “When I was eighteen years old, you broke my heart. Stomped on it. Pulverized it into a mess I thought would be irreparable. I cried for two months, cut my hair and dyed it a really awful blond, let it grow out, made friends in college. I even had a boyfriend, a hot linebacker who was excellent in bed. But every day since, I’ve wished I was here with a guy who voluntarily runs into burning buildings. I wanted to be waiting at home with my heart stuck to the roof of my mouth, hoping he’d text me whenever a warehouse fire was splashed all over the local news. I longed to be getting into arguments about whether it was okay to use my family’s money to get us a better apartment because my man was so proud he insisted on supporting us on his city salary.”
“So, still mad.”
She angled her head, taking him in like he was a bug not worthy of her attention. And then she gave him a huge-ass smile.
Fuckin’ A! Hell, fuckin’ B, C, D, and E. He felt like he’d been pumped with a triple dose of tropical sunshine.
“Sorry, just needed to get it out,” she said. “You dumped me a month after we had sex for the first time and that kind of thing is enough to give a girl a complex. I had it in my head that I must have been god-awful in the sack.”
Mierda. Surely she had not been living with that?
She stayed the tip-of-his-tongue protest with a hand, and that she still had the imperious thing going on put his groin on serious notice.
“But I realized fairly quickly that it was for the best. We were from different worlds, Beck. I don’t harbor any grudges.”
Listening to her mature and measured assessment should have put him at ease. Should have. But his body did not feel loose. His mind did not accept this.
“It’s okay to be a little ticked off,” he said, strangely ticked off himself at her self-possession. “I treated you pretty shabbily.”
She arched a dark eyebrow, its delicate upward curve a message in itself. “After all this time, you’d rather I was angry. You’d rather I kept you in here”—she touched a clenched fist to the soft swell of her breast—“because it would mean I still care and you still have some power over me.”
Yes, a million times, yes. He hooked her pearls to bring her closer and then, very deliberately, placed one palm against the hallway’s wall inches from her heat-stained cheek.
“I’d rather you were mad because then I could make it better. Remember what I used to do to calm you down? Your dad would piss you off and then I would piss you off more and before you knew it, you were coming apart, screaming my name.”
A muscle ticked at the corner of her mouth, begging for his thumb to soothe it.
So he did.
“Kissing you, touching you, every hurried fumble in my car, every time we explored each other’s bodies—it was all amazing. And when after months, years of waiting, I finally drove deep inside you where I belonged, that was also amazing, Darcy. Sex had nothing to do with why we didn’t work out.”
There. He’d said it. As for the reasons for their split—the real reasons—now was neither the time nor the place. Might never be, but she needed to know she was not to blame.
The soft thud of a closing door signaled that someone was exiting the restroom around the corner. A guy weaved by on his way back to the bar, and with each passing second, Beck’s heart thundered in his ears.
He turned back to Darcy in time to catch her blinking away an intrusive thought. “Thank you for setting the record straight and letting me know my sexual inexperience was not a contributing factor.”