Page 13 of Her BRATVA Protector
“I don’t think…”
“He’s not going to see me for the first time in the leggings I wore all day. I’ll be back quick.”
She kisses my cheek as she passes and runs up the stairs. Two minutes later I hear water running in her bathroom.
I look down at myself.
I am still in the blue cotton sundress. The raggedy one he saw me in.
Go change, Lisa.
I don’t go change because if I do; I am admitting that I care what he sees. That this is something.
I sit at the kitchen table in my blue dress, drink my cold tea, as the light goes the deep purple of last-light.
And then I hear it. The crunch of gravel. A car coming up the drive. The engine cuts. A door opens and shuts. Footsteps on the porch.
I close my eyes.
God. I know you’re laughing. Help me anyway.
Three hard knocks on the front door.
The kind that rattle the frame.
The kind that say,open up.
When I get up, my legs feel like someone else’s. I smooth my hands down the front of my dress…no, Lisa;you said you weren’t doing that, leave it alone…and cross the kitchen, the hall and the foyer in my bare feet. The wood is still cool, and I tell my heart to settle down for the second time today, and for the second time today my heart does not listen.
I put my hand on the doorknob.
Get it together, woman. Open the door.
Oh, sweetLord!
He is standing on my porch, and the man haschanged clothes.
The suit is gone. The waistcoat is gone. The white shirt I have spent six hours trying not to remember is gone. He’s in a charcoal henley. Buttons undone, the soft cotton stretched across a chest so broad I have to physically forbid my eyes from doing anything. The sleeves are pushed up to his elbows, andLord, the tattoos! The lines I caught in glimpses out of his collar this afternoon areeverywhere…both forearms, ink running from his wrists up under the henley, dark intricate work I can’t read in the dying light but want to, want to so bad I have to clench my hands at my sides. There’s a vein running down the inside of his forearm I am going to be thinking about for a long, long time. His watch is still on. The rings on his big, manly fingers are still on. And he’s wearing black jeans. Fitted but not tight, sitting on a pair of hips I am not allowed to look at, over heavy black boots that look like they cost as much as my car.
He looks… fucking delicious.
He’s carrying a duffel bag in one hand…black leather, single strap, expensive-looking. Dangling over one boulder-sized shoulder from the tips of his fingers.
Get yourself together.
His eyes fall on me andstop.
He looks at me the way he looked at me the first time. Slow. From head to toe and back up again. And when he gets back to my face, he stays there, and the blue of his eyes does that thing again…pupils widening, just a fraction, just enough that I see it because I am, stupidly, looking right into his gorgeous eyes.
The corner of his sexy mouth pulls up, the beard twitching.
“Aye,” he says, like he’s confirming something to himself. “There she is.”
His voice is rougher than it was this afternoon. Lower. He’s been on the phone all day, maybe, or in the kind of conversation that wears a man’s throat down. Whatever it is, it’s doing things to me that should be illegal.
I cross my arms.
It is the eleven-hundredth time I have crossed my arms today. The motion is automatic. Useless. He sees it and his devastating grin widens, like he isamusedthat this is still my best defense. My only one…
