Vindicate (Recovered Innocence #1)(15)

I shrug. “I never noticed before.”

“You were checking out my ass?”

“Yeah.”

He looks away, then back. He’s fighting a smile. “And you liked what you saw?”

“What’s not to like?”

“What else do you like about me?”

“You have nice hair.”

He shoves his hands in the front pockets of his jeans, rocking a little. “Anything else?” He’s enjoying this.

I lift my shoulders. “You’re pretty easy to look at, overall.”

He continues to stare at me with that strange expression that if I had to guess was a mixture of joy, confusion, pride, disbelief, and…longing? We’re stopped in the middle of the walkway, forcing people to move around us like water around pebbles in a stream. He takes a step closer to me and I can see that his eyes are brown, but not an ordinary kind of brown. They’re a kind of bronze with a dark brown, almost black, ring around the outside. Funny, I never noticed that before. He eases a little closer and I don’t move, caught in the tractor beam of his gaze.

He reaches out and captures the first two fingers of my left hand. “You’re pretty easy to look at, overall too.” His voice is a husky whisper that only I can hear. “Very easy.”

His compliment does strange things to me. I flush, a full-body rush of heat followed by tingling in the palms of my hands and feet and…other places. I can’t feel anything else except his thumb stroking my fingers and the thick, hard thump of my heart.

Someone bumps my shoulder, pulling my fingers from Leo’s, and the spell is broken. Looking away, I clear my throat and start out again for the Forever 21. Leo follows slowly at first and then quickens his stride to catch up to me. If he says anything right now I might just punch him in the face. Thankfully, he keeps his mouth shut.

We enter the store and I spot Mindy right away. She’s got the kind of curly hair that explodes out around her pretty square face. She’s the same age as Cassandra would be and I can’t help but feel a twinge of resentment toward her. The old question of why Cassandra and not someone else swirls and I try to not pin too much hope on what Mindy might say and how it could help Beau.

Leo waits to catch her eye until she’s finished with her customer. She does a double take, then saunters over toward us. Over toward Leo, really. I doubt if she’s noticed me yet.

“Hi, Mindy?” he says. “I’m Leo and this is Cora.”

She glances at me for the briefest second. “You didn’t say you’d be bringing her.”

Great. She’s not going to talk with me here. “I think I’ll go get a smoothie,” I say.

Leo looks down at me with a crease between his brows. We’d discussed this possibility. It would now be on him to pull what he can from Mindy.

“I’ll catch up with you later,” he says, running his worried gaze over me.

I give him a jaunty wave to let him know that it’s okay, even though it’s not. I’m dying to know what Mindy has to say. Glancing back at them as I exit the store, I can tell that Leo already has her wrapped in his charm. Having just been the recipient of that charm, I know how she’s feeling.

It’s the second time today that I have uncharitable thoughts toward Mindy.





Chapter 8


Leo


Mindy leads me to her office at the back of the store and closes the door. It’s no bigger than a closet. She clears some stuff off a chair so I can sit down. I can hardly concentrate on what she’s saying—something about her office being a mess—let alone what I’m supposed to say. My head is full of Cora. She doesn’t even know she does it when she twists me up in knots. It’s like she doesn’t even have to try. Just her being her is enough to knock me back a step.

Like this morning with the tea. It’s the same every time. She takes the lid off, grips it in both hands, closes her eyes, and inhales. I don’t know what she thinks of when she smells that tea, but the look on her face…I can’t breathe. It’s indescribable. All I know is that look has me bringing her tea every morning just to witness it. I discovered what Earl Grey does to her by accident. We stopped at my favorite coffee place one afternoon when I was dragging ass so I could get a double-shot pick-me-up. While we waited Cora opened the tester tins of tea on the shelf behind us and started smelling them. When she came to the Earl Grey she got that look.

I stood there and watched her, fascinated by her reaction. She held the tin, taking periodic sniffs of it until they called my name, then she reluctantly replaced the lid and put it back on the shelf. That was when I started adding Earl Grey to my morning order.

And then just now, out there in the mall, when she checked out my ass. Until that moment I was beginning to think that she’d parked me permanently in the friend zone. She liked my ass. And my hair. And the way I looked overall. It took a tremendous amount of restraint not to grab her and kiss her the way I’ve wanted to from practically the first moment I saw her. For the barest of seconds she looked like she might want to be kissed and then some * bumped her and she shook it off, becoming determined Cora again.

I don’t know what I did to suddenly earn her notice, but now that I have it I feel like a junkie looking for his next fix. I want it again. No, I need it again.

“I don’t know how I can help you,” Mindy says, drawing me back to the here and now. “I told the police everything I know. Besides, I’m not looking to help free Cassandra’s murderer. He can rot in jail forever, for all I care.”