Sweet Dreams (Colorado Mountain #2)(80)

I stared at him and he held my stare.

Then he sighed before he muttered, “After bein’ gone weeks at least I got your tongue down my throat and your legs wrapped around me before you showed me the edge of that tongue.”

Although there were more than a few things we needed to discuss, he did just get home, we had been separated for weeks and since the beginning with him I’d been mostly shrew and partly stupid. He told me he “just got home” which meant, again, he’d come straight to me.

I decided I should probably stop being a shrew and I should definitely stop being stupid.

“We’ll talk later,” I said softly.

“Yeah,” he said softly back, his hand left my hair and I lifted up a bit but kept my hands flat on his chest. “Gotta get home, clear out the truck. I’ll be back to pick you up when you get off. We’ll have dinner at my place.”

I felt another shiver, this one internal, at the thought of having dinner at his place. I had no idea where he lived but I wanted to see it. I also wanted to have dinner with him. We’d never had dinner just the two of us. That would be nice.

“Okay,” I agreed.

“We’ll swing by the hotel first,” he told me.

“Why?”

His brows drew together. “Get your shit.”

“My shit?”

“Yeah.”

“What shit?”

“Whatever shit you need.”

I stared at him.

“Babe, your shit. You’re spendin’ the night.”

“Oh,” I breathed and the internal shiver went external. “Okay,” I finished.

Tate’s eyes roamed my face then he noted. “Figure you got about five minutes left on your break.”

“Yes?”

He lifted up, his head slanted slightly to the side and his mouth got close to mine.

“What you gonna do with it?” he muttered, his eyes looking into mine, his words a dare.

My hands slid up his chest to curl around both sides of his neck, my head tilted the opposite way to his and, like any good employee, I used my five minutes with my boss wisely.

* * * * *

I was on the back of Tate’s bike, my arms wrapped around him, my chin on his shoulder, the wind whipping through my hair.

It was after my shift, after we’d popped by the hotel to get my “shit”, after I’d waved to Ned and Betty. We were heading into the hills, we were surrounded by pine and aspen and we were going to Tate’s place.

After he left the bar, I had spent the rest of my shift contemplating my actions from the moment Tate arrived.

I wondered, this early in our relationship, if I should be running across the bar in front of our customers (and Bubba and Twyla), throwing myself in his arms and necking with him. That said a lot, maybe more than I wanted it to say. Granted Tate seemed to appreciate it but I wondered if I should be playing it cooler. Running through a bar and launching yourself at your new boyfriend like he’d just returned from war, not like you’d been separated a few weeks, was far from cool.

I also wondered, since Tate brought that out in me, the desire to throw myself at him in front of an audience and the ability to do it without thinking, why, minutes later, I was, as Tate put it, showing him the edge of my tongue. Tate seemed to draw that out of me too.

This was, I decided, because he was not like any other man I’d met.

Brad got his way nearly all the time but he didn’t do it like Tate did it. Brad controlled my emotions. I’d realized of late that Brad had insidiously planted that seed that I was less than him and lucky to have him and, for some fool reason, I nourished that seed. Brad had done what he wanted when he wanted and I fell in line because I was terrified of losing him or not living up to the false gloriousness that I had thought was him.

Tate did anything he wanted too and expected me to put up with it or give into it. This was annoying. I was all for Tate being a macho man, badass, bounty hunting biker because all that was immensely attractive but I’d spent more than ten years being in the control of a man. I wasn’t looking for that kind of thing again no matter what form it came in.

That said, as Caroline noted, Brad thought he was all that and wasn’t but Tate was. No man liked a bitchy, nagging, argumentative shrew and, I would guess, definitely not a man like Tate. If I didn’t cool that too, maybe I’d turn him off and lose him.

So I was at a loss, thinking I should be both harder to get and easier to deal with. I needed to sort myself out, I just didn’t know how. What I knew was Tate was who he was and that was unlikely to change and most of it I liked so I didn’t want to do anything to mess it up.

I stopped chewing on this in my head when Tate turned into a long drive. This drive ran the length of a long house that was built into a hill, it’s first floor raised and it’s ground floor tucked into the hill, the windows only two or three feet from the ground. It fit cozy in a clearing of trees. It ended in a two car garage and had a deck that ran high the length of its front at the first floor but it jutted out to a kind of balcony on the end.

Tate drove around the side and parked the bike. I hopped off and he swung his leg off, alighting in front of me. He opened the leather bag on the side of his bike where he’d stowed my stuff, tagged my small bag, grabbed my hand and led me to the side door of the garage. He dropped my hand to unlock the door then took it again to lead me through the garage, where his dusty Explorer was parked in the middle of the big space, to the side door of the house.