Chapter Two
“ABSOLUTELY NOT,” Itell him, which is a strange thing to hear coming out of my own mouth, given that I’d promised myself on the long drive in that whatever this man offered, I’d be cool about it, I’d be unbothered, I’d be the kind of woman who has men proposing fake engagements to her over porch lunch on a Tuesday and merely lifts one eyebrow.
So much for that.
I’m already turning, already two steps back toward the door and the truck and the rest of my dignified life, when his hand closes around my wrist from behind.
He’s faster than a man that size has any right to be, and the next thing I know my back’s against one of the cool stone posts that hold up his impossible porch, with forty miles of his own gold country rolling away behind me, and Loukas Karalis is close. Close enough that the heat coming off him reaches me before he does.
Close enough that my pulse, the disloyal thing, leaps against the warm circle of his fingers, and I know he feels it, I know he does, the dark eyes holding mine a beat longer than a second ago.
I want this to make my skin crawl. I want it desperately, the way you want a glass of water in the night. Skin-crawling I could use. Skin-crawling would let me wrench free and drive home with my dignity in one piece. But that isn’t what happens.
What happens is warm and low and humiliating and entirely the opposite of crawling, and I hold onto my fury with both hands the way you hold a railing on a bad stair, the fury being the only thing on this porch I still trust.
“Let go of my wrist,” I tell him through my teeth.
“You walked before I finished.” He drawls it, unbothered, his hold not loosening by a degree. “Surely you know how much I dislike being walked out on.”
“And surely you know how much I dislike being pranked, so why don’t we both go home unhappy. Is that what this is? Some bet? Humiliate the shrew, eighteen years later, for old times’ sake?”
I tip my face up to deliver it, which turns out to be a tactical error of the first order, the kind I apparently specialize in, the kind that brings my mouth up to within a breath of his and turns the air between us thick and strange.
It’s the sort of strange where two people are either about to do murder or do something a great deal stupider, and with his fingers banded warm around my wrist and his eyes gone dark I couldn’t have told you, right then, which way it was going to break.
“Look at my face, Blythe.” His voice drops, the accent surfacing low enough that I feel it more than hear it. “Do I look like a man wasting an afternoon on a joke?”
He does not. That’s the trouble with him, it’s always been the trouble, he looks like a man who decided how this ends a while ago and is simply waiting, with infinite patience, for me to catch up.
Worse, the longer he holds my gaze the more I understand we’re standing far too close for two people who supposedly loathe each other, and that if one of us doesn’t say something cutting in the next second, the silence is going to fill up with something neither of us can take back.
So I cut. “If you’re not joking, then you’re desperate. Either way, let go—”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll bite your hand off.”
He lets go.
Good.
“Pity,” he murmurs, stepping back just far enough that I can think again, which I resent, having only just gotten used to not thinking. “If I’d let you do it, you’d have enjoyed it, and a man likes to save that sort of thing for the engagement.”
I should’ve known he’d find a way to turn my own teeth against me. I open my mouth to inform him that I’d enjoy it the way a hawk enjoys a finger, all consequence and no romance, and what comes out instead is nothing, because Sensible Blythe has clapped a hand over both our mouths and is hissing that anything I say next is going to make this worse.
For once, I listen.
“Would you like to hear the terms,” he says, “or would you prefer to keep glaring? I’ve all afternoon for either.”
“I don’t care about your terms—”
He names a number.
I stop caring about not caring.
It’s a horrifying thing to feel happen in your own chest, the exact moment a number reaches in and changes your mind for you, and I hate that he watched it land, I hate that he knew it would. There’s no harm in listening though, is there. I’m not committing to a single thing. I’m a grown woman who can sit on a porch and let a man talk, and so I let him talk, and apparently there’s a train.
A real one, the kind they don’t make anymore, a restored luxury line he’s reviving out of San Antonio with a consortium of ranch and oil money he’s spent the last year charming. Sleeper cars. Crystal in the dining car.
