“So what happened after the guys answered your essay questions?”
“I told them they all sounded so fascinating, I didn’t know how a girl could choose, and if they were feeling competitive maybe they ought to play a game together. At least now they have an occupation and their hands are full of cards so they aren’t arguing.”
She sounded like a pre-school teacher who’d just passed out paste and construction paper to unruly toddlers.
“Glory... I’m pretty sure they still believe you’re going to be the prize. Whether or not that was your intent.”
She went still.
“Really?”
He almost rolled his eyes. He believed her. She might not be “his business,” but that didn’t mean he didn’t still know her really, really well.
“Glory, do you remember when you were in the chemistry lab in high school, and you added the wrong chemical to the experiment, and it foamed all over and you had to stay after to clean it up and it took all night?”
A swift succession of emotions flashed over her face: surprise, wicked amusement, something like yearning. Maybe pain. She was realizing, maybe, that he had all the same memories she did, from different angles.
“I remember. It’s actually called elephant toothpaste. I added therightchemical... if you want it to foam.” Her mouth tipped up at the corner.
“Yeah, well, I think Leather Vest is like that little extra chemical in that mundane mix. Except I think he can blow up the lab. Don’t play with that guy.”
Damn. He shouldn’t have issued it as an order.
She froze. Her face went dark. “You sure love to lay down the law, don’t you, Eli? But you don’t get a say in who Iplaywith.”
She shoved away from the bar as if she were pushing him bodily away and, with a flick of her hair over her shoulder, headed toward the back of the bar without another word.
“Dammit, Glory—”
Heads turned at his raised voice.
Glory was as good at exits as she was at entrances. The eyes of all those men followed the swish of her hips and the sway of her hair until she was gone.
Hell.
He knew how they felt.
And worse—or better—than that, he knew howshefelt. He knew the weight of her whole self from the time he’d grabbed her by the belt loops just in time to keep her from skipping out into oncoming traffic when he was nine and she was seven.
Or from when he was eighteen and she was sixteen, the weight of her arm, which she’d slid to wrap around him when she’d found him outside alone on the day of his father’s funeral, leaning against the back porch railing. His hand a visor over his eyes, as if he could hide the world from him and himself from the world. She’d tipped her head against his shoulder; there was no way she couldn’t feel him shaking. She didn’t say a word, though. He was everybody’s rock, hers included—his mother’s, his sister’s. Everyone knew football heroes didn’t cry.
She’d stayed with him until he could draw a steady breath again. And then she’d gone back into the house without a word.
In truth, her weight was no more a burden to him than wings were a burden to a bird.
His instinct right now was to lunge after her and pull her back by the belt loops again.
But she was right: he didn’t have the right to do it. It would have been more of a capture than a rescue. An attempt to hold on to something that was doing its damnedest to pull away.
For a disorienting moment he felt utterly blank. As if the very laws of physics had changed.
And then he got a grip. Because she was right about another thing: he did love laws. He loved their structure and certainty and they were his refuge when life got a little too painful or messy or ambiguous.
And for God’s sake, he had his pride. A lot of it. Well-earned.
That’s what got him moving again. So he nodded to Carl, and Carl nodded back, and then Eli nodded once more to the poker players and accompanied it with a meaningful glare to drive his point home, and he went back out the way he came and got in his cruiser. He radioed his location to Deputy Owen Haggerty and told him everything was fine at the Plugged Nickel, which felt like such a lie.
Then he pressed his head back against his car seat.
