Love, Diamonds, and Spades (Cactus Creek #2)(23)

“Let go of me.” She tried in vain to pull herself out of his grip.

“Not until you tell me why you’re giving me the cold shoulder.”

“Why don’t you go back to Dani’s office? It looked pretty warm in there,” she tossed out casually, ceasing her struggles, and instead cloaking herself with an air of indifference.

Oh, hell no.

Rylan swiftly tugged her against his chest and effectively vaporized the distance she was trying to put between them. “Warm, huh? Is that what you think you saw?” He tilted her stubborn face up to his. “Well then I guess I’d better show you what hot looks like instead.”

His mouth seized hers in an unyielding kiss that didn’t just burn, it scorched. Igniting new levels of heat he never knew existed, he didn’t relent until he felt her anger finally dissolve. “I’d never hurt you like that,” he whispered roughly. “What you saw was comfort for a friend, nothing more. You’re overreacting—”

“I’m not,” she bit out, looking more confused than upset now.

“Quinn, honey, I swear. We’re just friends—”

“I’m not jealous!”

There was an underlying tone of frustrated honesty there that had him pausing. He was missing something here.

She stared at him, looking almost lost. “I wasn’t jealous. Not really. I was annoyed, of course. And yes, I wanted to pull your arms off and smack you with ‘em for daring to put your lips on another woman after everything you said at Desert Confections yesterday.”

“I told you—”

She narrowed her eyes at him then in exasperation. “Oh, please. If you saw me cuddled up with a man the way you were with Dani just now, confiding in him and letting him kiss my tears away, you’d have gone ballistic on his ass.”

“Damn straight,” he growled.

One perfectly arched exactly-you-moron brow winged up to make her silent point.

“Fine,” he conceded. “I get it, okay. You’re right. You have every right to want to yank my arms off and beat me with them. But you have to see it from my perspective. Dani’s one of my best friends, and I’ve always seen her as a little sister. Whereas any man touching you wouldn’t be able to hold onto a single friggin’ platonic thought in his head no matter how hard he tried. Trust me, I know,” he rumbled with feeling.

Her eyes crinkled at the corners over his grousing but she remained silent.

“I’m sure it looked bad,” he continued, brushing his thumb over her still-heated cheek. “And I’m sorry if it hurt you unintentionally. But from now on, don’t stomp off without checking if your baseless ideas about me aren’t in fact insane.”

“I didn’t. Have any ideas about you, I mean. I wasn’t mad at you, honest.”

“I was…scared.”

Concern streaked through his veins. “Scared about what, honey?”

“You and Dani up there. That was an instant replay of one of the worst moments of my past—the night I’d caught Brody having sex with a groupie…when I was pregnant with Cooper.”

A snarl of outrage burst out of Rylan’s chest. What kind of sack of shit cheats on his pregnant girlfriend?

She placed a hand on his heaving chest. “It’s okay. Really. He’s not worth your anger.”

“But he hurt you,” growled Rylan, rage throbbing through him…until a realization hit him like a battering ram. His hands gripped her shoulders. “Are you telling me that I made you feel the way he did?” Tortured anguish roughened his voice. “Baby, please don’t tell me I hurt you that bad just now.”

She quickly slid her hands up to frame his face. “No. No, Rylan. Of course you didn’t. And that was what scared me. That’s why I left. I needed to…think.”

With a deep breath that she held for what seemed like an eternity, a calm seemed to settle over her features, before she explained, “Just now, when I saw you two, I felt jealous, of course. But in a possessive way, not a paranoid way. And the reason why…is because I trust you.” Her eyes shot up to his as if to measure his reaction.

Understanding and something a whole lot more weighty hit him square in the chest.

“I mean it’s crazy,” she said more to herself than him. “There you were in almost the exact same position I saw Brody and his little groupie, and I trusted you.”

He gently brushed her hair back away from her face. “And that scared you,” he murmured, reiterating her previous statement, feeling so damn much for this woman and her maddening ways. “So you left. To go think.”

“Yes, yes, and yes.” She brought her eyes up to meet his again. “But I was going to come back. I wouldn’t have missed out on the hitting you with your own arms part.”

He shook his head with gruff tenderness. “You make me crazy, you know that?” He held onto her chin to make sure she heard him. “As far as I’m concerned, when you’re in even remote viewing distance from me, no other woman even exists on the planet. And when you’re not, every spare thought I have revolves around when, and how, and how quickly I can get you back in viewing range, or better yet, back in my arms again. You can always trust me.”

He pressed a gentle kiss to the tip of her nose. “Believe me?”