Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(54)

She pulled a wad of papers—real, old-school paper, no kidding: she’d begged it off Fan, who had a strange but endearing fascination with origami—out from under her ass and laid the sheaves over the center console.

An offering. Just like those offerings of information he’d been leaving her for weeks. Which she chose to interpret as clear evidence that he still gave half a shit. At least, that was her hope. She didn’t dare breathe.

“Did you punctuate even a part of that in your head before you said it?” he asked.

“No. I couldn’t.” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and then let it slip out slow and painful. “If I’d paused at all, I wouldn’t have said anything. Do you have any idea how hard it is to self-describe your own motivations as whoa-pushy horniness?”

“Not really. Waste of time to regret emotions you don’t have any control over to begin with.”

“I wish to fuck I was you, then, because my past is crammed full of regrets.”

His hands slid off the steering wheel. (Ha! He did know about the vehicle control rig! He’d just been pretending to steer the car. Wait. Had he done that so he didn’t have to look at her, speak with her?) It recessed back into the dash. Their destination and route were programmed, and they were within the paint rails of a federal highway. Barring an emergency, the car could drive itself to Texas.

Which was just as well, since Angela didn’t plan on letting him pay a lot of attention to the road. She couldn’t touch him, fine. But she could talk to him.

He ran one hand through his hair, making it even more strokably disheveled. This man had no idea what he did to her libido on a near-constant basis.

He turned to her, half-lidded blue eyes burning like the Caribbean in July. Okay. Maybe he had a very small, very tiny idea.

“Hold the first four words of that sentence in your mind for a minute,” he said, “and tell me about this present. I know you haven’t been shopping a whole lot, so I’m curious what you rummaged up in the Pentarc.”

She widened her eyes in pretend shock. “Why, Doctor Hockley, have you been spying on me?”

“Yes. A whole lot, actually. Present?”

Angela had spent most of her life surrounded by liars. Half-truths, spun truths, and discarded truths were pervasive as air on the Colina Capitolina. She worked in lies, had built her career on them, so she knew Kellen could have sidestepped the accusation. He could have pretended offense that she’d even think he was hiding out and peeking. But he didn’t do either of those things. He admitted straight-up that he’d been watching her. That kind of honesty wasn’t easy, no matter how innate he made it seem.

She tapped the top paper.

He focused on the spot her finger indicated and read out loud, “‘The Armenian Lady’s Love,’ by… Aw shit, gal, you know I hate Wordsworth.”

“Just keep reading. Please.”

“‘The Armenian Lady’s Love: Abbreviated, Annotated, and Illustrated. P.S., It’s a fuck poem.’” His eyebrows cranked up his forehead when he read the postscript at the bottom of the page. (Technically, it was a footnote and was formatted as such, but nitpicking served no one.) “Now, hang on, I might find the dude’s poetry shitty, especially later stuff like this one here, when he was trying too hard to be Byron, but don’t you think defacing his work like this is even a little bit disrespectful?”

“Not even a little bit,” she said, unable to contain her grin. She set the heels of her hands on her bent leg and leaned forward, getting a good look at the paper and teasing the veriest edge of his personal space. Totally permissible. No touching involved. “Would you like to read it yourself, or shall I orate?”

“Both. Maybe at the same time? Says here there’s pictures, and I sure would hate to skip those.”

“Oh no, don’t do that. The, ah, artist put a lot of effort into drawing them.”

He picked up a corner of one page and flipped through. He would be admiring her Kama Sutra stick figures. She’d been hoping for a chuckle, something to break the ice. Instead he inspected each drawing thoroughly, skimmed through her margin notes, and carefully read the whole thing. Twice. He said nothing.

Nothing. Um, not encouraging.

She pointed near the top and cleared her throat like she was about to give a floor speech. “‘Hear now of a fair Armenian daughter…how she loved a Christian slave, and told her pain by word, look, deed, with hope that he might love again.’ That’s, ah, me. The Armenian chick.”

“I gathered. Am I meant to be the Christian slave or the gardener?”

“You can’t tell by the drawings?”

He turned the paper sideways. Squinted. “Oh, I see, they’re the same. See, here she’s… Well, that’s definitely a fresh reading on ‘Rusty lance, I ne’er shall grasp thee.’”

“Academic, would you say?”

“A-plus for effort.” He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose, and set the papers aside. “This is real clever, and I’m duly impressed you can remember, line for line, a subpar poem we were forced to learn more’n a decade ago. But I gotta ask, what is this all about?”

“It’s not obvious?” she replied. “I’m wooing you.”

“Wooing?” He stopped and squinted at her a bit like he’d looked at the sideways copulating stick figures: bemused but amused at the same time.