“Actually, no, I didn’t. Dezi,” I confirmed at his raised brow.
“I wish I could say I was surprised, but that guy is an enigma. If someone told me he was a world-class pianist, I wouldn’t be shocked. He plays his cards close to his vest.”
“He’s a good guy,” I insisted.
“He is. He can be like having a pain-in-the-ass, grown son at times. But underneath all the scuffling and bullshit, he’s a good man. It’s why I trust him here. I wouldn’t leave you with someone if I didn’t trust them implicitly.”
“I know that,” I agreed, nodding.
“I got a text from the apartment owner. He said things moved faster than he planned, so if we are ready, we can head out of the hotel and over there tomorrow. We don’t have to move in,” he rushed to add. “But maybe do some cleaning. If we have time and it needs it, painting. And figuring out dimensions so furniture can be ordered. And don’t,” he started, cutting me off when I started to open my mouth, “start giving me shit about buying furniture. Way I see it, this is my small way of paying you back.”
“Paying me back,” I repeated.
“For all the letters. For dragging me out of the drudgery that was my miserable life back then. This is the least I can do. Help you get set up in your own place. I mean, you don’t have to stay there after the… situation is handled. But while you figure shit out.”
“I kind of like it here,” I admitted. “I mean, I haven’t seen a whole lot of the area, but I felt this sort of, I don’t know, community here. I don’t know what the future holds, but if I can find a job here, I think I would like it.” A part of me didn’t want to go on, to be anything even resembling vulnerable with a man, but the other part of me wanted him to know how I felt. “And, um, you’re… you’re like the only person I know anymore. It would be nice to have a… friend, ah, nearby.”
To that, Cary’s eyes went soft. “I’d like that too. It’s important to have a support system. Especially when you are starting your life over.”
And he would know better than most. He had needed to start over again after he got out of prison. Having his club had been that support system for him.
Now, in a way, it would be that for me.
I mean, at least with Cary and Dezi anyway.
That was enough.
It was way more than I’d ever had before.
“Now I just need to figure out how I’m going to make a living.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“I have to worry about that.”
“No, you don’t,” Cary insisted.
“You can’t keep paying for me.”
“Sure, I can.”
“You’ve already—“
“Done the bare minimum to help out an… old friend.”
“Bare minimum?” I scoffed, waving around the luxury hotel room full of things he’d bought for me.
“Listen to me, love,” Cary said, getting up, but only to drop down to a squat in front of me, keeping intense eye contact. “I don’t have a bunch of bills. I don’t have a mortgage to pay, or college tuition to handle. I have plenty of money, okay? This is barely a drop of it. So while, in the grand scheme of things, this might be more than the bare minimum to others, to me, that is exactly what it is. So stop sweating it, okay?”
He reached up at the end, closing his big hands over my much smaller ones, giving them a reassuring squeeze.
“Okay,” I agreed, finding it suddenly impossible to look away from his unfairly handsome face.
“Okay,” he repeated in this low, sexy rumble that sent a shiver through my insides. Only, it wasn’t just my insides. My whole body did a quick tremble.
Before I could even think to say I was cold or some other excuse for the involuntary motion, Cary was suddenly getting to his feet, and walking over toward the window. Like he couldn’t wait to get away from me. Like he knew what that shiver meant, and that it wasn’t that I was chilly.
And, worse yet, that he wanted absolutely nothing to do with that thing.
That was, well, that was completely and utterly humiliating.
I mean, it wasn’t like I meant for it to happen.
I didn’t even think my body could react to someone like that.
Ugh.
“I’m, ah, I’m going to take a bath,” I said, popping up so fast that I knocked two of my books onto the floor.
I didn’t even pause to pick them up, just grabbed some pajamas, and rushed into the bathroom. Where I could emotionally spiral in peace.
By the time my bath had cooled, then gotten redrawn the third time, I figured I’d more or less managed to pull myself together.
It was fine.
Just a moment of insanity.
It had been so long since a man reached for me in a kind way, and my body just overreacted. That was it. No big deal.
At least that was the story I told myself as I got dressed and finally made my way back out of the bathroom.
“You okay?” Cary asked, sitting on the desk chair that he’d moved as close to the windows as possible.
“Yeah, ah, I just… I have a headache,” I lied. I’d like to claim that it was difficult to come up with a lie. But the fact of the matter was, I’d needed to do a lot of lying in my life. And if you practiced it enough, when things like beatings could be on the other side of getting it wrong, you learned pretty quickly to be convincing. “I thought the bath would help, but it didn’t,” I continued as I climbed under the covers. “I think I just need to sleep it off,” I finished, rolling onto my side to face away from him.
“Okay. I’ll keep it down,” Cary said, lowering his voice as I curled up on my side, like if I pulled my knees tightly enough to my chest, it might ease the swirling ache in my stomach at lying to the only man who’d ever been kind to me.
I stayed that way—stubbornly staring at the back of my eyelids—for what had to have been hours as Cary quietly moved around me.
I was so attune to him that I could feel his movements, could conjure up images as he quietly moved around, tidying up the space, flipping through his recipe book, texting on his phone, turning on the TV to a news station that I knew he could barely hear.
Then, finally, as he grabbed some clothes and moved into the bathroom. The water turned on a second later.
Try as I might—though, admittedly, I didn’t try all that hard—I couldn’t stop visions from playing across my mind.
Of him pulling off his cut, his tee, his jeans, of seeing that body he so carefully cultivated day in and day out on full display.
I would barely let myself even think it, always careful to push thoughts like that about Cary away, but I wanted to know what the rest of his tattoos looked like. I’d made a study of all the visible ones since we’d been in the hotel room together. I’d asked him the stories of several. But I knew there were more. Dozens more. Over his back, chest, his sides, and maybe even his thighs.
I wanted to see them.
I wanted to know why they existed.
And, yes, fine, I wanted to trace them with my fingertips.
God, I wanted to trace them with my tongue.
But that was so insane that I pushed the thought immediately away whenever it popped up.