He raised an eyebrow.
“But you didn’t even like me.”
“Oh, I liked you just fine, baby. I’ve always liked you just fine.”
Yep, I was a goner. “But you were mean to me.”
His smile was slow. “I was tough on you, not mean, and that shit ate me up for hours and days after.”
It had? “You could have always been sweet.”
“I thought I was too old for you. Thought I’d done too many shitty things in my life to have you in it, Luna,” he explained softly. “I didn’t want to care about you, and I fought that shit as long as I could.”
“Because of the bad things you think you’ve done?”
His face softened. “Because of the bad things I know I’ve done,” he confirmed, and that too snuck under my ribs.
I knew all about the guilt that came with doing things that you weren’t proud of. Necessary evils. Unnecessary ones too.
I took a step closer to him, my breasts brushing just across his chest. I felt his hand slip around my back to land on the small of it, pulling me in even more. “But what if I would’ve started dating someone?”
Rip tipped his head closer to mine, bringing his mouth just inches from me. “I would’ve made sure there hadn’t been a second date, baby girl. I know you went on seven of them until this bullshit recently. I know you went to dinner on three, to the movies on two, a baseball game on one, and Mickey’s on another. I listened. I know. I was there the night you got your place broken into. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”
That was true. That was all true. “How’d you know that?”
I’d swear I could already feel his lips on mine. “I listen, I told you.”
“What else have you heard?”
“Everything.” His head moved, his mouth brushing my throat so lightly it was the best tickle of my life.
And just as soon as he brushed his pink lips over me, he pulled back.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him, trying to smile so he would know I was happy… and I hoped he was too.
One of those big hands went up to the top of his head and he scrubbed it back and forth across the top, still watching me with these eyes that said a dozen different emotions. The only one I could focus on was that uncertain one though.
“What is it?” I asked him, still holding on to my smile. At least until it hit me. Maybe… “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
He blinked those long eyelashes, and I couldn’t miss the way his eyes just kind of sort of squinted at me. “Baby girl, that’s not it at all.”
“What is it?”
But he still looked off. His hand came up and moved across his chest, from one massively rounded pec to the other and then going up to the base of his throat, where his fingers curled into the material of his compression shirt and he peeled it away from his neck maybe an inch. “I should tell you something first.”
Oh, no. “There’s something wrong with your…?” I dipped my eyes toward the lower half of his body.
That got me a blink. “Excuse me?”
All right, maybe that wasn’t it. “You have three nipples? Because that wouldn’t be a big deal. I’ve got stretch marks if you—Why are you looking at me like that?”
Because he was looking at me weird. He really was. “I couldn’t give less of a fuck about you having some marks, and I don’t have three nipples.”
I wasn’t surprised that my hands were steady as I set them on his hips, feeling the warmth of his body through his shirt. “What is it then?”
His hand tugged at his shirt again, drawing my gaze down to the inch of tattooed skin I could see… andthenit finally settled in my brain.
Ohhh.
