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"I'm giving you something to hang on to."
"Your butt?"
"No. My belt." He took her hand again and held it instead of shoving her fingers down the back of his pants again. "Get your mind out of the gutter, Kate. I'm not perverted enough to stick your hand down my pants." He pulled her along a few steps before he added, "Not while your grandfather's missing, and not unless you ask real nice."
The press of his warm palm against hers heated up more than her hand. She felt it in her chest and stomach. "Don't worry. I'm not going to ask."
"You might."
"You wanna bet? No. Forget I asked that."
His soft laughter was drowned out by the squeak of the garage door as he opened it. He flipped on the light and looked inside. "His truck's parked next to her Blazer," he said and turned to face Kate. The garage light lit him up from behind, kind of like a saint.
She pulled her hand free and stuck it in her coat pocket. Rob Sutter was no saint. He was too good at sinning. "Do you think they're in the house?"
"Yes."
"What can they be doing? The lights are out."
He rocked back on his heels, and the light from the garage poured over the shoulders of his dark blue coat and lit up the side of his face. He raised a brow.
It took her several seconds to understand the significance of his cocked eyebrow. "Gross! He's seventy. He'll have a heart attack."
"My mom's a nurse, she'll thump him back to life."
Kate sucked in a breath. "Aren't you even a little freaked out about them doing"-she pointed to the backdoor-"that, in there?"
"First of all, my mind isn't going to go down that path. And second, I'm glad my mother's found someone."
"Well, I'm glad too. That my grandfather has found someone, I mean." But was she? "Do you have a key, or should we knock?"
"Neither."
"What? Neither?"
Rob turned off the light and shut the garage door. "I'm not going to bust in on my mother." He took Kate's hand and headed back to the HUMMER. "I doubt you would have appreciated Stanley busting in on us the other night while we were doing the wild thing in the condom aisle."
"I don't want to talk about that. It was a mistake. It shouldn't have happened." Especially since she was fairly certain he was seeing other women now.
"I'm getting really tired of what we can and can't talk about. We can't talk about the night we met. We can't talk about the first night I kissed you. We can't talk about the night we had sex. That's bullshit, Kate." They stopped by the passenger side of the HUMMER, and Kate reached for the door handle. "Some mistakes were made the other night. I'll give you that." He planted his hand on the window and kept the door closed. "Maybe it shouldn't have happened the way it did, but it was going to happen. And you know what? I'm really not sorry about the way it happened. I had a hell of a good time. Sooner or later, we were going to have sex. It was inevitable."
"I don't know if it was inevitable, but what I do know is that each time you make me feel good, you turn around and make me feel like shit."
"Maybe you're looking for something to get pissed off about."
Was she? No.
He opened the door. "I said I was sorry for kissing you on the head and saying thanks. Don't you think it's time to get over it?"
Over it? She crawled into the car and looked at his inky black outline. "It's only been a week."
"A week's a long time to walk around mad," he said and shut the door.
On the drive home, neither spoke. Kate stared out her window and wondered if Rob was right. Did she look for reasons to be angry? No, she didn't think so.
Rob pulled the HUMMER into Stanley's driveway and walked her to the door. "Thanks for coming over here and helping me look for my grandfather," she said as she stood on the top step and turned to face him.
"Any time." The light on the house shone down on him, and she saw his face clearly for the first time that evening. A lock of brown hair fell across his forehead and touched his brow. She looked into his green eyes looking back at her. Then his gaze lowered to her mouth. "Good night, Kate."
