Frayed (Connections, #4)(99)

She playfully pushes me backward. “I didn’t say I’d go home with you.”

I feel a corner of my mouth turn up. “I have food, lots of food, at my place.”

“I can be ready in ten minutes.”

? ? ?

What you can learn about a person in a short period of time when you pay attention astounds me. I’ve learned so much about S’belle Wilde over the past couple of months and even more in this block of time we’ve spent together. I’ve learned she loves to eat but never keeps food in her apartment—I’m pretty sure she doesn’t like to eat alone. I’ve learned she’s really smart and thinks long and hard about things—but likes to come across as being more aloof or maybe even scatterbrained. Which she’s neither. I’ve learned she likes sex dirty and she likes it clean. And I’ve learned she knows how to turn me on and she does it on purpose.

I glance over at her fingers as they tap the screen of her phone. “Did you check in with your mother?”

“She’s texted me every four hours around the clock. I told her I’m spending the day at the beach and Xander and River too. I don’t want them to hunt me down.”

I laugh. “Or me.”

She laughs back. “That too.”

I reach out to caress her bare leg. She’s wearing a pair of denim shorts with an eighties type of sweatshirt that hangs off her shoulder, exposing the golden threads of her bikini top. My heart beats a little faster at the thought of finally seeing her stand in front of me in it—just the bikini top, that is, nothing else. I quickly chase the thought away.

“I need to give Josie a heads-up too,” she says, tapping her fingers on her phone again. “She’ll be worried when I don’t show up for work tomorrow.”

“She’s Wyatt’s assistant, right?”

She looks up at me from over her sunglasses. “Yes. So you do pay attention.”

“You think I don’t?”

She looks back down. “No. I just wonder how much people hear when I talk because sometimes I feel like I never shut up.”

I smirk at her—she’s definitely quirky and it’s a breath of fresh air from all of the other women I’ve known. “Speaking of work, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Okay,” she says, dropping her phone in the cup holder and twisting in my direction.

“The night Wyatt saw me at Beck’s he was with that arrogant SOB.”

“Romeo?”

I nod and go for broke. “He told me he’d seen your phone, that he saw a message from me. Why would you show him that?”

She frowns and reaches up to brush some fallen hair out of my eyes. “It wasn’t like that.”

I glance over and lift her sunglasses so I can see into her eyes; the green is even deeper than usual with the sunlight streaming through the window. “What was it like, then?”

“Why do you hate him?” Her voice is soft and full of curiosity.

My fingers tighten back around the wheel. “For a shit ton of reasons. Because he was captain of the football team and I was a surfer, because he lived on the bluff and I lived on the beach, because he was a jock and I was . . . well, I was more of a rebel, I guess, but most of all because from what I saw that night he’s still a prick.”

A laugh bursts from her. “I think that has to be one of the most honest responses anyone has ever given me.”

I shake my head at her and grab her hand.

“It’s true.”

I raise an eyebrow. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“I’m not interested in him.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“No, but I can tell what you’re thinking. You’re not going to like this, but I was late for work and when I got there Josie pulled me into the break room. I set all my stuff down, including my phone, and to make a long story short, Tate and Romeo came looking for me and since we use the break room as a meeting room sometimes, I left Romeo in there while I grabbed something from my office. You texted me and he saw the text.”

“See, he’s a prick,” I mutter under my breath.

She leans over and kisses my lips. “I’m not interested in him.”

“So you’ve said.”

Her hand runs up the leg of my jeans. “I am interested in you, though.”

I flick her a glance and the honesty I see in her expression puts a smile on my face—and her touch, well, it’s doing exactly what she intended. Trying to push sex out of my mind for a bit, I say, “Tell me something about you that I don’t know.”

She picks up her phone, looks at the screen, then drops it in her bag before pulling her sunglasses down from atop her head and back onto her face. When I hop on the freeway she presses the button for the window and it slides down. She inhales as the wind blows her mass of red curls all around her face. Then she turns back to me. “I love the feel of the wind in my face. I love riding on the back of your bike. And I love the Santa Anas.”

The sun is shining today and the winds have died down, but they’re still stronger than on a typical day. She points out the window to the smoldering smoke in the distance. “But I hate the destruction they cause.”

“You know surfers think of them as heaven and hell mixed in one?”