Finally, she spoke again. “You don’t seem bitter.”
“I’m past all that, but I was plenty bitter at first. I told myself I hated her. I thought she’d played me good and proper. And she did. But over time, I started to admit to myself that it takes two to make a marriage—a good oneorone that fails.”
“Hmm.” Vanessa held his gaze. “I don’t know that she played you, really. It sounds like Maybelle played herself. You were collateral damage.”
“Ouch.”
“What? You’d prefer to think that she played you on purpose, that she used you and took advantage of your trust?”
He laughed then. “Yeah, I would.”
She tucked her head down again and muttered something about men under her breath. He decided not to ask what.
“Hey.” He curled a finger under her chin, lifting her face up so that she looked at him. Once she focused those fine eyes on him, he rubbed his thumb back and forth across her pillowy mouth. “You’re tough on a guy, you know that, Miss Bronco?”
“Just calling it the way I see it.”
He rolled to his back and pulled her with him, so all that lush softness ended up on top of him, tempting him. He wanted her again. But then, he always did.
She asked, “You really think I’m too tough on you?”
Gruffly, he commanded, “Kiss me,” and lifted his head to capture her lips.
She pulled back to grin down at him. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“All right. You’re alittletoo tough on me, maybe.”
“Aww. Poor baby.”
“No guy likes to think of himself as collateral damage, like he’s just an incidental bad result from a woman working through her problems.”
“I hear you. But, Jameson, isn’t it always that way when love doesn’t work out? For both people, really? They’ve been writing songs about collateral damage forever. From ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’ and onward. People hurt each other because they’re too busy struggling through their own crap to be careful of the other person’s heart. To me, that seems better somehow, than to mess someone over on purpose. At the end, Maybelle said she was still ‘kind of crazy’ about you. That means she really did love you. She just wasn’t very good at loving.”
“Maybelle being ‘kind of crazy’ about me is not anything that I would call love.”
“I only mean she still cared about you. The way you just told it to me, even at the end she seemed to have real affection for you. That’s something, isn’t it? That matters.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“Who can say? Whether she played me or I was just random damage of her acting out her own personal drama, it didn’t work out. I felt really bad for a while. But I’m over it now.” He eased his fingers up under the heavy fall of her hair and wrapped them around her nape. “Right now, I want you to kiss me. A kiss would make everything so much better.”
“How, exactly, is a kiss going to fix anything?”
“Trust me. It will.”
“A woman knows not to trust a guy who says, ‘trust me.’”
“Do it anyway.” He guided her head down so that their lips almost touched. “Make my night. Your kiss is the solution to all the world’s problems.”
“Oh, you are a silver-tongued devil, Jameson John.”
“Kiss me, Vanessa.”
On a sweet little sigh, she covered his waiting mouth with hers. He wrapped his arms tighter around her and wished for things he would probably never have.
Chapter Nine
