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Her eyes went wide and she swallowed hard, stalling before she responded. “I thought you said you were close with your mom.”
“Something bad happened when I was sixteen. Something really bad. I talk to her almost every day, but she’s safer if I don’t see her.”
“Did you…did you hurt her?” she whispered.
“No. No. But I could. She saw me at my worst, and I just want to keep her, you know?”
“Whatever happened…did she forgive you?”
“I don’t know. I never asked for it. I don’t forgive me, so I don’t deserve for her to say those words. We don’t talk about it. That’s the unspoken rule.”
“What happened?”
He huffed a dark laugh and shook his head. “That conversation will never happen. Please don’t ask me for it.”
She studied his profile—the rigid set to his masculine lips, the chiseled features that looked drawn just with him talking about whatever memory was flashing across the back of his mind right now.
She’d seen some pretty awful human experiences through her clients’ eyes in her years as a therapist, and had good instincts on this stuff. Whatever had happened, he was right. It was bad.
His skin was growing too hot to touch, so she pulled her hand away.
“Just so you know, if you weren’t the temperature of the sun right now, I wouldn’t be moving away from you,” she assured him. “I didn’t want you questioning why I’m moving away.”
He tossed her a quick glance, and then looked back to the turn he was making into the junkyard. “I can’t tell if you’re psychic, or just really good at reading people.”
“Maybe I’m a magical creature too!” she joked.
“Fuck, if I could give away my magical-ness, I would.”
“I’ll be using that in my everyday vocabulary now, just so you know. Magical-ness.”
He smiled. “You can touch me again now. I’m good.” He cleared his throat and muttered, “I mean, if you want to. You don’t have to.”
The invitation touched her deeply. Slowly, she moved her fingertips to his inner elbow again, testing his skin. He was hot, but not untouchable anymore. She settled back into squeezing his inner arm gently. “Are you a bonfire shifter or something?”
His chuckle filled the cab of his truck. “Sure.”
“I love bonfires. Especially in the fall, and when s’mores are involved. I also like pumpkin-flavored everything at coffee shops, and big chunky sweaters over cozy leggings, and also, Hallie sounded nice when I talked to her the other day.”
He took a couple moments to respond, but that was probably due to her shifting trajectory of conversation. “She’s all right,” he murmured as he parked the truck in front of an office building.
“You don’t like Hallie?”
“The Fastlanders are all on my nerves this week.”
“Why?”
He turned off the truck and got out, leaving her question unanswered and hanging heavily in the air.
“Oookaaay,” she said under her breath, and got out too.
“They get on my nerves every week,” he said from where he was holding the door open for her. “It’s a story for another time. If you met them, you would understand.”
And suddenly, Timber really, really wanted to meet the Fastlanders.
Perhaps they would fill in some of the holes Wreck was leaving in their conversations.
Chapter Five
