Page 55 of Echoes in the Storm
“Gee, thanks, Cam,” he teases.
“No, really.” I tug his hand as we near the side street I parked on. “I am proud of you. I gave you an out, and yet you still came. Why?”
“It was important.” He shrugs, as though to dismiss the subject.
But I don’t want to let it go. I want to know why staying here with me, a woman he’s known less than a week, has finally given him the strength to face this fear of his?
“Can we talk about where this thing with us is at?” I pull my hand free as we approach the BMW.
He hastily pulls his phone out as soon the street lights end, and yet he doesn’t turn it on; he palms it, turning it over in his hand.
“What do you want to discuss?” The second I unlock the car he’s in the front seat quicker than an excited dog.
I drop down into the driver’s seat and twist to set my bag in the back. “Was our … fooling around some heat-of-the-moment thing? A once-off?”
The level at which I’m able to keep my emotions at check seriously impresses me. Normally, I avoid conversations such as this because they’re too hard. If I can deny, deny, deny, then that’s what I’ll do.
And yet, here I am, watching Duke, cool as a cucumber while he formulates a careful answer.
“It might have been heat-of-the-moment, but it wasn’t a mistake, Cam. You know that.”
“But?” I sense his hesitancy.
“But, we’re fucking strangers, right?” He laughs awkwardly as I start the car. “Don’t you think what we did in your paddock was kind of putting the horse before the cart?”
I roll my eyes, gunning the car into the street. “I hardly asked you to marry me, Duke. It was a bit of light groping.”
“I finger-fucked you.”
“You wanted to,” I blurt out in an attempt to ignore the fire those words have ignited in me. “Besides, you were the one who pulled me onto your boner yesterday morning. So that’s twice now that you’ve instigated things.”
“You looked hot.” He dismisses the fact as though it’s self-explanatory why I should accept a rock-hard dick being pressed against me as part of a normal morning routine. “Isn’t it normal for a guy to get a hard-on when there’s a good looking woman that close to him?”
“You’d think so, but I can name one guy who didn’t find me that appealing.”
Duke twists in his seat to face me, a frown visible in the dim confines of the car.
“Jared,” I confirm what he’s no doubt thinking. “My ex. The one who visited the other day.”
He keeps staring, his eyes moving up and down my body as I drive.
“What?”
“Just trying to figure out how exactly he could wake up next to you and not get a morning wood.”
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”
“You started it.”
I look across at him as I bring the car to a stop at one of the few sets of lights in our town. He grins back, and the two of us fall apart laughing at the direction our “serious” chat has gone.
“How on earth did we go from ‘What’s up with us?’ to ‘What kind of guy doesn’t get a boner in the morning?’” I ask with a laugh.
Duke shrugs, scooting down in his seat to prop one boot up on the side of my centre console. “I have no idea, but it’s a legitimate question. Was the guy impotent or something?”
“We had a daughter, remember?” It saddens me how easily I stated that, how relatively unaffected I am referring to Taylah in conversation.
One step at a time.