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“Hello, Storm,” I replied, opening my eyes and forcing myself to get ahold of my emotions before I looked at him.
He tugged my arm so I had to face him even if I didn’t want to. With him, keeping my act up was hard. Just looking at him was making me crack.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, moving until our chests were touching.
I let out a short, hard laugh. “Wrong? Why, nothing, Storm. I’m just fine,” I drawled.
He grabbed my chin. “No, it’s fucking not. Is this about Lula Mae hugging me?”
It was about so much more than that.
I said nothing.
He tilted his head and studied me. “Are you jealous?” he asked as his mouth curled up at the corners.
I was going to end up slapping the shit out of him in his momma’s house.
“No! I’m not jealous!” I spit at him.
He ran the pad of his thumb over my bottom lip. “Yeah, you are. You’re jealous.” He sounded so damn pleased.
The pain I’d been covering up was now morphing into something much more dangerous.
“Admit it,” he urged, his voice dropping to a husky whisper.
“You hugging her wouldn’t have bothered me if you hadn’t lied to me about where you were yesterday.”
His eyes narrowed then. “Lied about what?” he asked, no longer looking so damn happy.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe that you spent the day with your first love. Catching up.”
“What?” he asked, but I saw the glimmer in his eyes that told me something else.
He had been caught, and he knew it.
I had asked for this. I had trusted a man, believed he loved me, and walked right into this. Even when I had found out he had already lied to me about something.
What else was there? How many lies?
“Don’t,” I said, shoving at his chest, but he didn’t move.
Instead, he backed me up against the wall, caging me in with his hands on the wall on either side of my head as he stared down at me.
“Yesterday, I had a meeting at Stellan’s. Thaddeus and Wayon Davidson were there. Thaddeus is over the Louisiana branch of the family. Wayon is his son, Lula Mae’s twin brother. When it was over, I went out to the pool with Wayon and Thatcher, and we had a drink. Lula Mae came out there when she returned from shopping.” He paused and leaned his face so close to me that our breaths mingled. “I talked about you. So much so that Thatcher begged me to shut up and leave because I was making him nauseous,” he said. “I left. Came home. Fucked you on the kitchen bar when I found you in one of my shirts, looking like an angel.”
That sounded … plausible … believable.
I let out a long breath as the razor blades started to disappear slowly.
“You never told me you had a first love.”
He grinned, and his gaze dropped back to my lips. “I had a first lust,” he replied. “Not love. But please keep on. I like you jealous. It’s hot as fuck.”
Okay, maybe I had been jealous. That was new for me. I had never reacted like that before, and the way it’d felt was not pleasant. It had been horrible. I felt raw from it all. Exposed and very vulnerable.
“She remembers it differently,” I told him.
His lips brushed against mine. “Keep on,” he urged. “You keep this jealous shit up, and I’m gonna fuck you against this wall. My momma might never recover, but it’ll be worth it.”
“I’m not being jealous. I am telling you that Lula Mae does not see things the same way you do. Her mother doesn’t like me at all. Why is that? Hmm? And the way she talked about you and told me about your first kiss among the peach trees … well, it ruined them for me. And I really liked those trees.”
Storm stopped kissing me and lifted his head to look down at me for a minute. Then, he straightened, and his fingers laced with mine. “Come on,” he said and began leading me back to the foyer.
“Where are we going? I need to get Dovie.”
“She’s fine,” he replied, not slowing down.
When we reached the foyer, everyone had cleared out. Annette was at the open door, waving to those getting in their cars. She glanced at us and opened her mouth, but Storm didn’t stop or even slow down. Her eyes widened as she saw he was going to keep going.
“Let Dovie know we will be back to get her later,” he said as we walked past her.
“Okay,” she replied.
“That was rude,” I told Storm, who was taking us to his Jeep.
“Don’t care,” he replied.
“Storm! We should have asked if Dovie could stay.”
“She can.”
He jerked open the passenger door to the Jeep and picked me up, then put me inside. When he closed the door and started to the driver’s side, I saw Lula Mae watching us as she stood in front of a silver Mercedes sedan. The frown on her face vanished when she realized I had caught her watching us, and she smiled, then waved.
