Page 18 of Easy On Me

She nodded, gaze still on the road. The silence bugged me, worming under my skin. What was she thinking? Maybe weighing if I was worth risk of Elizabeth.

“Thank you for being upfront with me.” Her voice was soft.

This time, the relief crashed through me. I reached for her hand, squeezing her fingers with mine.

The rest of the way to Sale City, a comfortable silence lingered around us. I reluctantly released her hand to get us parked downtown. The small town storefronts, empty for years, sported layers of dust on the glass, but BB’s was good eating, and people drove from all over on Friday and Saturday nights.

I jogged around the hood to open her door, only to find a small scowl twisting her face. “You brought me here so people don’t see us and it gets back to her.”

“What?” With a scoff, I leaned in to drop a kiss on the stern line of her mouth. “No. I brought you here because the food is amazing.”

She cast a cynical glance around us.

I tugged her out of the truck and pointed her toward the restaurant. Hands at her hips, I guided her ahead of me, our boots scraping on the asphalt. Her expression didn’t clear.

“Trust me,” I murmured near her ear, a shudder moving through her under my easy grasp, and smiled at the shiver. We fired hot and all I had to do was get close to her.

Everything between us was good. The idea of us was early still, although Grandaddy had convinced Grandma to elope after two weeks, scandalizing the entirety of Chandler County, and she was complicated.

Well, not really.

She needed security and honesty and transparency. Who didn’t? And I could give her those things.

She was honest, too, although something more than Colt had sparked those needs. These weren’t the response to a bad relationship, planted during a season and easily uprooted. No, these were deep-rooted, grown over a lifetime.

I thought about asking, because I wanted to know everything about her, but she’d tell me when she was ready.

I’d called ahead and asked River to hold us a table, so we were seated quickly. And if she’d thought we wouldn’t run into anybody I knew over here, she was sadly mistaken. More than half the patrons hailed from Coney, and I’d had to stop and speak several times on the way to our booth.

Like I’d promised her, the food was excellent, and I muffled a groan at the rich, buttery grits with crawfish. I waved my fork at her seafood platter. “You don’t eat crawfish?”

A visible shudder moved over her body, and she made a face, nose wrinkled in disgust. “I dissected them in biology in high school.”

“Yeah, that’s right. You’re from Thomasville.” We didn’t dissect anything when I went through school, just clicked through computerized scenarios. “Forget you didn’t go to Chandler-Haynes.”

“I did.” She shifted in her chair, her jaw tightening a moment before she relaxed. “For a little while.”

“Yeah?” I tried, but didn’t remember her. But that had been a decade ago, and I’d been stupid about Elizabeth back then.

“It wasn’t very long.” She laid her fork down, a sharp movement leaving the utensil perfectly aligned.

I wasn’t stupid – I was brushing up on something uncomfortable for her. I took an invisible step back. “It’s okay. I can’t eat fish roe. It weirds me out.”

She wrinkled her nose again. “We dissected perch, too. I get it.”

Laying my forearm on the table, I brushed my pinky along hers. “We have a lot in common.”

One brow rose in a dry look as she studied me. “You mean the sex is good.”

“I mean we’re good. Stop trying to reduce what we’re becoming to something basic.”

She pursed her lips, a clear sign of annoyance and an action that only made me want to kiss her, but didn’t argue. I counted that as a win.

While we finished eating, we stayed away from anything else emotional, like what we might be or my ex or hers. She talked about her best and worst customers of the week, and I shared about trying to fix a hydraulic leak while I was knee-deep in mud. On the way home, she touched my arm, tracing the muscles under my shirtsleeve, stroking my shoulder before running a teasing fingertip along my neck. By the time I pulled into her drive, the subtle foreplay had my dick pulsing against my zipper.

Shifting to park, I sucked in a breath, my belly hollow and heavy all at the same time. I turned to look at her, those pretty hazel eyes glittering in the dim light cast from her front porch. She followed my collar, brushing the skin at the base of my throat, then flicked a glance at the CVS bag between us.

“So are you coming in?”