I glance sideways. I need to get her back on solid ground, which means I need to get her thinking aboutsomething else. “You were dancing in there like you were fightin’ ghosts. Somebody teach you those killer moves?”
She forces out a laugh that isn’t a laugh. “Maybe I was fighting ghosts. I’ve seen enough of them.”
Not what I expected. The way she says it lands heavy. She turns fast enough to send my gut into a high dive, and her voice drops low with her next question.
“Shiloh…were you…did we…” She trails off.
My grip tightens on the wheel.
So that’s what this is. Something happened, and until she saw me standing there with those beers, she thought it was me.
“Did we what, sweetheart?” My hand flexes on the wheel, but I keep my voice steady. Even. Like I’m not half hard and half pissed off and trying to decide who deserves my anger more—whoever touched her, or her for not knowing the difference.
She swallows. Her attention lands south on my mouth, then to my hands—one on the wheel, one resting near the console. If she’s looking for proof…
“You know, in there. Before I—” She stops and her jaw tightens hard enough to crack. “Never mind.”
Her quicksilver grin is there and gone fast enough I almost think I imagined it.
“Talk about ghosts.”
Reva strikes me as a competent woman who’d rather kick an ass than kiss one—even her own. Now her behavior is split in a way I’m struggling to justify. She’s acting like we already crossed a line we can’t come back from, and I know good and goddamn well I didn’t cross it in there.
I know what she’s really asking.
Her scent confirms it—the musky layer clinging to her, the added pink in her cheeks that doesn’t read like beer and dancing. She’s asking if she had sex with me tonight.
A low throb hums through me and leaves bristling anger in its wake—the kind I know better than to unleash when a woman’s already on a knife edge. My grip chokes around the steering wheel as if plastic and metal might warp beneath my fingers.
“We kissed,” I say, keeping my voice easy so I don’t spook her. “Back there. That’s it.”
Reva stills, and in the flash of the next light something like confusion and dread flicker across her face.
“Right. Good. Because I don’t actually… I—” She cuts herself off and covers whatever she wanted to say with sarcasm. “Whatever.”
My instincts ramp up like a cattle prod straight to my brain. I slide my hand down the console toward her—brush her knee first, asking permission.
When she doesn’t move away, I grab her thigh and squeeze once. A reminder. A grounding.
Also—if I’m honest—a warning to myself.
Because I want her. Bad. And tonight was supposed to be mine.
Someone scared her, though. Someone got too close. I stroke her thigh lightly with my thumb, the motion soothing. Settling.
How the fuck did they manage it when I stood there the entire time—except for the minute I went to get a drink?
“Sweetheart, did something happen back there? Do I need to find someone and have a come to Jesus talk with him? Just tell me?—“
“No!”
Reva pulls her leg away, crosses it over the other, squeezing tight. She bites down on her lip and a flush travels from her cheeks down her neck. The air in the cab goes tight and unbreathable.
The shift is palpable.
The change in her scent. The blush. The tightness in her chest that pokes her nipples out beneath the fabric of her shirt.
She’s turned on—shamefully, violently—and it’s making her react instead of think.
