“You can just drop me off and go back. I can get myself back to Houston,” I offered, watching the lines along his mouth tell me just how uncomfortable he was.
Because I had put him into this situation.
The man beside me slid me a look so slow that a sloth would have managed to catch it. His eyebrows went up at about the same pace, and he locked those blazing blue-green eyes on my face and said in that hoarse voice of his, “Not doing that.”
Pride was a bitch.
“I’m being serious, Rip.” I gave him a smile that was tight and probably totally fake. “I can go by myself. It isn’t a big deal. You’ve done enough.”
I’d swear he rolled his eyes. “Shut it, Luna.”
He was such a liar. “You look like you’ve got the flu, boss.”
“I’m all right,” he tried to insist.
I pressed my lips together and looked at the coloring on his face. “Is that why you’ve been squeezing the steering wheel so hard your knuckles have been turning white for the last hour?” I asked him, pressing my lips together again immediately afterward because… well, it was the truth.
That hard jaw jerked from side to side, and he even shook his head a little. “Luna, I’m good,” he tried to tell me.
“I don’t want you to do something you don’t want to do.”
He didn’t say a word for a moment, but I watched as his shoulders lost some of their tension and lowered unexpectedly. His voice was calm as he said, “I got no problem going to the funeral or the service. You can drop it.”
I bit my lip and watched him, trying to decide whether I needed to keep arguing with him. It was obvious he didn’t want to be here. I wasn’t that blind or dumb. I also believed him when he said it wasn’t the funeral he had an issue with.
But then what else could bother Rip… that wasn’t Mr. Cooper or Lydia? Or screwups at work?
Just as I opened my mouth to tell him to wait in the car, his fingers flexed on the steering wheel again, and he told me, “I’m doing this with you. I owe you. It’s fine.”
He owed me.
That was the only reason he was here. It wasn’t like I didn’t know that, and it wasn’t like that should hurt my feelings. Because it didn’t. What it did was make my heart clench up a little at the reminder that it was only a favor… a favor I had earned through a lie… for why he was with me right then, sitting not even two feet away in a dress shirt, pants, and a scarf with a coat between us. Looking more handsome than I ever could have imagined, if I did that kind of thing.
I kept my mouth shut and nodded, even if chances were he didn’t see me do it.
The navigation gave an instruction for an upcoming turn a quarter of a mile away, and he got into the lane a second before asking, “Who’s funeral are we going to?”
I squeezed my fingers together tighter. I owed him that much information, didn’t I? “My grandmother.”
His “Oh” was just about what I was expecting. What I didn’t expect was the way his question came out. Maybe it was the fact that he even asked the question in the first place. The last time I’d been sick, he hadn’t asked if I was feeling better, he’d askedyou contagious still?Sothe “You good?” right then, caught me totally off guard, especially when it came out soft.
But I still lied. “I’m good.”
I didn’t miss the way his eyes slid in my direction, his expression mirroring the tone of his voice—thoughtful, different. “You don’t look good.”
He didn’t need to know that I didn’t feel good about this whole thing. So, I made a face. Then I shrugged the shoulder closest to him. “I’m just…”
Should I tell him?
Nah. I was greedy and enough of a liar to keep the bad to myself since we were so close already. Plus, he was being a liar about being fine coming with me, when it was clear he wasn’t.
“I haven’t been home… to San Antonio,” I corrected myself, hating that I called this city home, “in a long time.”
His hands flexed on the steering wheel once more, and I wasn’t sure I imagined that his voice seemed to get deeper, losing that almost sweet edge to it. “You used to live here?”
“Yeah,” I told him vaguely. “I grew up here.”
Those teal-colored eyes came my way again, and a muscle in his cheek tensed. “When’d you move away?” he grumbled the question. These were more personal questions than he’d asked me in the three years we had known each other.
