There was a beat of silence. “I’m happy to hear she’s okay.”
“Are you?”
Nicholas shifted, his heavy thigh brushing against hers. She scooted back a hair. Those thighs were dangerous. “Of course I am.”
She hummed, wishing she’d kept the snarky question back.Move on.Ten years ago, she’d run away instead of staying in the dramatic role ofspurned lover in this feud. She wasn’t about to start now.
“Of course I am,” he repeated more forcefully. “I wouldn’t wish her ill.”
She finished the outline of the woman’s legs and leaned back on her stool. “Yeah. Fine.”
“You can believe me or not, Livvy.” His voice was downright frigid now. “I’m not a monster.”
“My family would say differently.” She roughly capped the Sharpie, rose to her feet, and threw it on her worktable.
“What would you say?”
I would say I’ve never been able to hate you the way I should.“I’d say nothing.”
His eyes dropped to her hands, and she realized she was wringing them. She immediately turned to her table and started to arrange and rearrange the few supplies she kept out. Though she was messy in the rest of her life, she was a neat freak at work.
Leather creaked behind her as Nicholas came to his feet. She didn’t hear him walking toward her, but she could sense his body behind her. “Livvy—”
“I do actually have a lot to do,” she interrupted him. “You can go.”
“I’m not done talking to you.”
“Well, I’m done talking toyou.”
Silence, for a long moment. “You didn’t finish my tattoo.”
She closed her eyes at the ridiculous statement. “For fuck’s sake. There’s not going to be any tattoo.” He’d won this round of chicken. He’d won all the rounds of chicken, because she was the ultimatechicken, okay? Cluck, cluck. “We don’t have anything more to talk about. I’m only here for a month, tops, until my mom’s self-sufficient again. You can go back to your peaceful life and—” She broke off with a gasp when he grasped her shoulders and whirled her around.
Whoa.
He crowded her, big hands planted on the table on either side of her hips. Metal hit her ass, and his body pressed flush against her front. He should have looked ridiculous with the pinup fairy doodled on his arm, but it didn’t detract from his attractiveness. He was too close, too big, too...him.
His chest was hard, and beneath her top, her nipples tightened with the friction. Without conscious thought, her legs widened, making space for him. Their clothes did nothing to disguise the thick bulge of his penis. It pressed tantalizingly against her softening core.
“You think I can have peace with you here?”
His rough whisper blew over her senses and her ear. Her head fell back submissively, baring her throat. “Yes.”
His head lowered, lips hovering over the arch of her neck. “Why didn’t you text me this year?” he asked.
She should have expected that question, as awkward as it was. Black and white. She’d ruined a precious pattern in his ordered brain.
She could bullshit him, but he’d only poke and poke. So she’d give him a snippet of truth. Enough to satisfy him. “I turned thirty.”
“I know how old you are.”
“Ten years.” She licked her lips, wishing he was the one licking them. “It would have made it an even decade since we first started meeting like that.” He’d called it quits with their relationship two months shy of her twentieth birthday, two weeks after the accident that had left them both grieving a parent, a day after his dad had swindled her mother out of her half of the C&O.
The threads that made up the timeline of their complicated past were basically a tangled knot.
I can’t do this anymore. It’s impossible for us to be together now, Nicholas had told her, stony-faced.
“I figured ten years is long enough for us to get each other out of our systems.”Ten years is long enough for me to be hung up on a man who hates to want me. Who I can’t seem to hate enough to stop wanting.
