“Thanks for dinner, Gar,” Halle said, blowing the man a kiss. She turned her head toward me and nodded, then left.
“Brr,” Gary joked with a dramatic shiver. “She don’t like you.”
“You noticed, huh?” I asked dryly.
Rosemary moved to start cleaning up the table, and I followed to help her.
“She takes a minute to warm up,” Gary explained.
My mate was noticeably quiet.
“Was she like that with you?” I asked Gary, just to keep the conversation going.
“Hell no,” he replied, carefully pushing himself out of his wheelchair. “By the time we met, she’d already had her best friend talkin’ me up for a month at least.”
“Ah, so that was the problem,” I joked. “Rosemary didn’t spend enough time listing my good points.”
I expected Rosemary to make a joke or at least acknowledge what I’d said, but she was silent as she loaded the dishwasher.
“Thunder,” Gary called. The old dog scrambled up loudly from his place in the living room, then slowly made his way into the kitchen.
“Pop, take your chair,” Rosemary scolded as Gary opened the back door for the bulldog.
“You worry about yourself,” Gary replied easily. “I’ve been sitting all day. I can walk out to the porch while Thunder does his business.”
He disappeared outside, closing the door behind him.
Rosemary and I finished cleaning the kitchen in silence, carefully moving around each other. By the time she opened the door and called out a good night to her dad, I was completely confused.
I’d known that she wasn’t happy I left her behind when I’d gone to see my family. I even understood it. But she wasn’t acting angry. If I spoke to her, she responded. She said thank you when I wiped down the table with a dishrag. From the moment I’d gotten back, she hadn’t sent me a dirty or dismissive look.
“I’m exhausted,” she said, walking back toward me. “Want to go to bed?”
Absolutely nothing sounded better than getting into bed with her.
“Yeah.”
I hadn’t noticed—for obvious reasons, she’d been in nothing but a towel—but it looked like Rosemary had spent some time cleaning up while I was gone. The piles of clothes were missingfrom her chair, and the top of the dresser was neatly organized. She’d even changed the sheets on her bed.
“I don’t have any room in my dresser,” she said, taking off the straps to her overalls as she walked to the opposite side of the bed. “But you brought some clothes, right?”
“I forgot them in the car,” I replied, closing us in for the night. “By the time I got back, I wasn’t thinking about anything but you.”
She smiled, but it didn’t seem to reach her eyes.
“Well, you can use the chair when you bring them in,” she said with a shrug, stepping out of the overalls. “It’s the best I can do.”
“I’m used to living out of my duffel.” Pulling off my shirt, I tossed it onto the offered chair.
“Makes sense,” she replied, contorting her arms so she could slide the sports bra out from beneath her tank top. She dropped it to the floor and reached out to pull the blankets low enough to slide in.
I’d never been someone who stared when I noticed a beautiful woman. I could remember something in my head just fine without making someone else feel uncomfortable—but I couldn’t take my eyes off her breasts. They were small and soft and bounced a little with the movement of her body, her nipples tight and pressed against the thin top.
My mouth watered as I kicked off my boots and shoved my jeans down my thighs. By the time I climbed in beside her, I was hard as a rock, and she was already curled on her side facing me, her knees pulled up nearly to her chest.
“I’m going to stay here tomorrow,” I assured her, finding her thigh under the blanket. Her skin was so soft and so hot. Gods, she was like a furnace. “They don’t need me at the house.”
“Okay,” she said easily with a nod. “Everything was okay when you got there?”
