“I know.” His hand moved higher, circling the inside of her thigh. Making her throb between her legs. “I don’t trust you, either. And yet—” Nadine held her breath as he followed the inner seam of her pants. “Sometimes a lack of trust makes it that much more exciting.”
He looked at her, leaning over the center console as he did. “Don’t you agree?”
With his unruly black hair and five o’ clock shadow, he reminded her of a genteel wolf. Ready to devour her if she stepped off the path, but only if she stepped off the path.
Patient. Polite.Predatory.
No, unlike the wedding, there was no mistaking his intentions now.
When she didn’t respond, he began to move his hand higher still, pressing just hard enough to make her slightly short of breath. “I know a scenic lookout point near here. Beautiful but not quite in season. I could take you there, lay you down just out of sight, and make you forget your own name. What do you think of that?”
Nadine closed her eyes, drawing in an unsteady breath. And then she pulled her leg away. “No,” she said, but it took effort.
Because she liked the idea of having her first time in a bank of wildflowers, with the air as heavy as the look in his eyes. She could feel the sweetly piercing ache of it already.
She just didn’t want to get hurt.
And this man would hurt her.
Cal studied her for a long moment, like he was trying to figure her out. There was something dissatisfied in his expression, almost brooding, that went far beyond thwarted desire. “Why are you fighting this?”
“Why do youlikeit?”
Another man might have hotly denied her accusations but Cal just continued looking at her, his jasper eyes restless as he continued to brace himself on the console.
“That’s a dangerous question,” he said eventually.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think you’d like the answer.”
She could feel his breath against her tingling lips, which still burned from the soft scoring of the stubble around his mouth. “I don’t—are you saying you’re dangerous?”
“Yes.”
Yes. It seemed to echo in the otherwise silent car. “To me?”
“Especially to you, little sparrow.”
Slowly—so slowly that it felt like slow-motion—he pulled back and started the engine, leaving her feeling as if she had just been painted all over in small, bristly needles of the most exquisitely cold ice.
C H A P T E R
S I X
? keep him excited ?
Argentum began to feel very small, very quickly. The difference between living in a small town versus a suburb, Nadine was finding, was the lack of variety. In a suburb like Pineview, you could go to a grocery store and conceivably encounter different people every time. There was a relative sense of anonymity. But in Argentum, it was always Helena Peters sitting behind the counter of the general store, looking stern and disapproving as she watched you over the top of her latest mail-order romance novel. Christian Hendricks was the one who always poured your drink at The Blue Bar. And it was always George Peters who got politely eighty-sixed at noon, wearing his folksy arrogance like a mayoral sash.
Nadine tried eating at the Yunnan Rooster to mix it up, even though it was empty every time she looked and there wasn’t a single Asian person in sight working at the restaurant. The blonde young woman who took her order seemed impatient with her, as well as unfriendly. When she got sick after eating “The Happy Lucky Combo Meal” (was that racist? she wondered—probably, not that anyone here cared), she wasn’t sure at first if it was food poisoning or just that they had forgotten to check the ingredients of one of the sauces.Forgot to check, she decided miserably, lying in bed with a cramping stomach after throwing up for a full hour.
She knew it had seemed too good to be true when the waitress told her that the honey walnut prawns were safe. They were never safe. But foolish her, she had thought that maybe the secret to safe prawns lurked here, in this little mountain retreat.
After that unfortunate incident, Nadine started going to the diner exclusively for her meals. They fried their foods in canola oil and duck fat, according to the waitress, and the steak and eggs were both fine as long as she didn’t order anything battered to go with them. The first time she’d gone, she had eaten in, but the staring and whispers had been so awkward that every time after that, Nadine had gotten her food to-go. When she got desperate for something green, she loaded up on apples and overpriced packaged salads at the general store, enduring Helena’s judgmental sniffs and stares.
“You might have said you were Noelle Cullraven’s sister,” Helena said. “I thought you looked familiar when you came in. You were in here before. Wearing a red dress.”
She saidred dresslike it meantred letter.
