I closed my eyes and my fingers curved spasmodically around his forearm.
That was beautiful, amazing, right, and the best part about it was, if I wasn’t mistaken, he wanted to give that to me.
I opened my eyes again when he kept talking.
“I’m sorry I had to bring him up but you gotta know that’s where I’m at. That’s why I stepped away from the empty pussy and parties and looked for somethin’ that meant somethin’. The problem was, I found you a month before Rosalie and I had the somethin’ that meant somethin’. I just didn’t think you wanted me that way and I liked spendin’ time with you enough, I was willin’ to take what you could give me.” His eyes warmed. “Now you’re willin’ to give me more and I’m gonna take that too.”
Suffice it to say, I was willing to give more to Shy, but he knew that and I had to go over some of the more important things he said.
So I commenced in doing that.
“You were gone for me?” I asked softly and got a grin in return as his face dipped closer.
“You and me may not have been tight since the day we first saw each other, but am I the kind of guy who hangs around listenin’ to bitches moan about work while ruining a dinner I gotta eat?” he asked.
No, he was absolutely not that kind of guy.
My belly got warmer and I whispered, “No.”
His eyes moved over my face again before they caught mine and he whispered back, “Gone for you.”
I closed my eyes and pulled in breath.
Yes, this was right.
“Sugar, look at me,” Shy ordered gently, and I opened my eyes. “Let’s go over it all. You are not Rosalie. That shit that went down with her will not go down with you. On that, baby, you got my word. When it goes around that we’re an us, we’re gonna face shit from the Club. How that’s gonna come, I don’t know, but I suspect it’ll come from your dad, even Cherry, and we gotta stand strong and prove to them this is what it is. And last and most important, to stand strong and prove it to them and ourselves, we gotta get our shit together and get outta this pattern where you go into your head and freeze me out and I get pissed and say shit that’s outta line. That means you gotta suck it up when I call you on your shit, and you gotta be willin’ to call me on mine. Are you with me on all this?”
I nodded.
After I nodded I found my mouth forming the word Why?
His head jerked slightly and his brows drew together before he repeated, “Why?”
It came out, I had to go with it.
“Yeah, Shy, why? Why me? Why us? You seem pretty sure, and I—”
I stopped talking when a big, beautiful white smile spread on his handsome face right before he burst out laughing.
He was good-looking always, better when he was laughing, but it kinda peeved me he was laughing when I wasn’t being funny.
“Shy,” I snapped into his laughter. He sobered, kind of, and focused on me. Then he started speaking.
“Baby, I got a piece of tail, I fuck,” he announced, and that didn’t make me any less peeved. I figured he noted that because he carried on, “I fuck and I do it hard. I take what I want and if the bitch gets off, golden. If she doesn’t let go enough to let me take her there, that’s not my problem.”
Again, this didn’t make me feel much better.
“I’m not sure why you’re sharing this with me, Shy,” I told him. “I’m equally unsure I feel real good about what you’re sharing.”
His hand shifted minutely so his thumb could move over my cheek and my lips before his eyes got intense and he explained, “I have never, not once, not in my life, made love to any woman. Not once. Not until what I just did with you.”
Oh.
Wow.
That was a good response.
“I had you up against the headboard, baby, but that was not fucking and it came natural. It’s what we have. I didn’t know that’s what I’d get but I’m pleased as fuck you gave it to me. That alone answers your why when it comes to the us part. As for why it’s you, I don’t know, I don’t care. It just is. It could be ’cause you’re gorgeous. It could be ’cause you’re funny. It could be ’cause I like the way you handled Pete when he lost his daughter. It could be ’cause you and me got Chaos in common, it’s us, it’s in our blood and this was meant to be. It could be ’cause I like the way you are with your family. It could be ’cause you get off on bein’ on the back of my bike almost as much as I get off straddling it. I figure it’s all that and more. I am not gonna analyze it. I’m gonna feel it ’cause I like it and that’s all there is to it.”
That response was even better.
“Do you wanna know why it’s you?” I asked quietly, my hand gliding up his arm to his chest.
“Don’t wanna piss you off, Tab, but I don’t give a fuck. I’m happy just rejoicin’ that it is.”
Another good answer.
“Now,” he continued, “you get that I’m pretty fuckin’ sure and my guess is, you’re here in my bed, my tee, and my arms, you’re pretty fuckin’ sure. So are we good?”
“Mostly,” I answered and his head tipped to the side.
“Mostly?” he prompted when I didn’t explain.
“Well, I didn’t get the work thing entirely sorted. I have a feeling they’ll let me renege on the contract since I told them I had a family emergency, but if I renege that means I don’t have a job.”
“Can you get your old one back?” he asked.
I shook my head. “They weren’t happy to see me go and they told me when I got back from Cape Cod, if I wanted to come back and they had an opening, they’d see what they could do, but I don’t wanna go back there, Shy. Since you and me, uh… had our thing, Dr. Dickhead got worse and began to target me. He used to spread his dickheadedness wide, but when I became his focus, I decided I couldn’t deal.”
“You talk to the administrators?”
“No, Shy and, darlin’ ”—I kept going quickly, because I knew by the change in his expression and the muscle that ticked in his jaw what he was going to say—“you don’t get how it works in that world, but doctors are king. I could get embroiled in a big drama but in the end it would be a lot of headache, time, and stress, and either I’d have to suck it up and carry on or I’d have to get out and move on. It’s just the way it is.”
“Lucky for you I don’t live in that world,” Shy replied and my belly lurched.
Uh-oh. I knew what that meant, and what that meant was that it was damage control time.
“Shy, you don’t and I don’t but I do have to exist in it for eight-hour shifts, five days a week.”
He leaned a bit away from me and declared casually, “No blowback.”
Great.
The guys said that word all the time and then things would happen, like a few years ago when Tyra got kidnapped and stabbed, like, a gazillion times. Granted, that huge drama wasn’t Dad’s fault. It happened because Tyra’s best friend Lanie’s messed-up fiancé was, well… totally freaking messed up. So messed up, he got both Tyra and Lanie dragged into it. Still, Dad also got in the mix, and no one had given me the full briefing but however it went down pissed my big brother Rush off so much he refused to approach the Club to become a recruit. This gave me the sense that Dad’s involvement upped Tyra’s vulnerability. She survived and she was a fighter, so she didn’t let what happened drag her down, not even a little bit.