“What?” I asked, licking the cold cream from my lips.
“Nah,” he said, grinning. “I’m just being dirty.”
I took another slurp, this time maintaining eye contact with him.Who was this hussy?
He cracked up, then refocused on the road. “I’ve unleashed a monster.”
I arched a brow in his direction. “Is that a complaint?”
He maneuvered around traffic with a grin twitching at his lips. “I will never complain about you sucking off my dessert.”
My face heated, and he grew serious.
“Kess?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure about the question. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” he said, then reached for my hand, kissing each knuckle. “You just blushed so violently, I wondered if direct references to sex make you uncomfortable.” Squeezing my hand, he glanced at me. “I never want to make you uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t. I liked it.”
My face grew even hotter.
His grin spread across his face, practically ear to ear. “Gotta say, blushing Rowdy is almost as hot as parking-garage-hand-job Rowdy.”
I covered my eyes with my free hand. “I’m never living that down, am I?”
“Nope.”
“I can’t help how noisy you make me.”
“You understand that this encourages me in all the wrong ways, right?”
God, I was going to die of whatever this mix of being turned on and embarrassed was.
“Good,” I said.
He went serious again. “But I want you to be honest with me. If I’m moving too fast, if I say things that make you shrink back, I want to know. I hate that in all this time we’ve gotten to know each other, you’ve never felt comfortable enough to be yourself with me.”
“That’s not true,” I said, my voice going soft all over again. “You’re one of the people I’m most myself with.”
“Your sassy side, maybe. But I want the vulnerable stuff too. I understand I’ve got to earn it, and I will, but I never want you to lie to me. Ever, never again.”
He said it gently, but he meant it. He wanted me to remove the mask. And with him, I knew I could.
While he maintained his focus on the road, I leaned across the console and kissed his cheek. “I promise to tell you the truth. And if I’m too uncomfortable with the truth, I’ll make sure you know that as well.”
We ate, neither of us worried about filling the silence with words. This was new to me, but quiet time with someone you loved had to be one of the most underrated pleasures in life.
A few miles outside of Driftwood, he spoke again. “I really do want to help Jaxon and Sadie.”
“You already helped so much, just by seeing the one thing the rest of us had missed.”
Kess, a confident business lawyer who’d made a ton of money, blushed. “Thanks, Rowdy. It was nice to be able to do that.”
A few minutes later, we rode through Wimberley, then made our way down Devil’s Backbone. He drove up to my cabin and parked. We were still holding hands.
For the first time tonight, the silence got awkward.
“I—”
