by Jill Shalvis
“Liar.”
Once again she started to escape, but another burst of lightning lit the place, and she went still.
Flat on his back, he reached over and ran a hand up the back of her thigh to cup her ass. “Where you going?”
A shockingly close roar of thunder sounded, rattling the windows, the ceiling, hell, even the floors, and Olivia turned and leapt on top of him. “Nowhere.”
Laughing softly, he tugged her into him, made a Herculean effort to get them both on the bed, and pulled the covers over them until they were cocooned. “Nowhere sounds good to me.”
Olivia snuggled into Cole’s body. Snuggled. She was still trembling and feeling a little bit like she’d revealed her tender underbelly. She felt…exposed and vulnerable, and as a rule, she didn’t do either very well.
And neither did Cole, she was guessing, given how he’d shut down after what had happened with the match. She’d managed to distract him from that, but he’d distracted her right back.
Still, she hadn’t forgotten that look of utter hollowness and despair. “Does it have to do with the rig explosion?” she asked quietly.
He’d been stroking a hand up and down her back, and his hand froze low on her spine.
“A little bit,” she guessed.
“The anniversary of Gil’s death is this week.” He said this into her hair, voice low, so low as to be almost inaudible, but she felt the vibration of the words rumble through his chest into hers as the words sank in.
She had one hand on his biceps, the other on his jaw. She stroked down his arm, around to his back, where beneath smooth, heated skin and muscle, she could feel the coiled tension in him. “You miss him.”
He let out a low breath and brushed his jaw to hers, saying nothing.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly.
“It’s not just the loss,” he said. “It’s that I thought…” He shook his head. “It’s turning out that maybe he wasn’t exactly the guy I thought.”
Her fingers trailed up and down his spine, the way he’d done to her only a little while before, and she realized his grief was mixed with something more. Anger.
She was definitely missing a piece of this puzzle. “What do you mean?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“It’s okay,” she murmured, “if you still don’t want to talk about it.” After all, she had plenty of her own secrets to protect.
“Something came out after,” he said. “After Gil died. And it changed…things. For me.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Oh, boy. Okay, so they were going to go there. And she couldn’t be surprised. He was not a man to hold back for long, if at all. “And whatever it is,” she said softly, “it affected your feelings for him?”
“Yeah. Though I’m trying to get past it.” He slid out of her arms and rose from the bed. “I’m getting water. Need anything?”
A moment to herself to regroup would be nice, to back away from the emotions that were entirely too close to the surface when it came to him. “No, thanks.”
Cole turned toward the kitchen and promptly tripped over the old trunk at the foot of her bed.When he righted it, the lid popped open. Inside were the costumes of her own personal collection, the ones she shared at Drama Days but couldn’t bear to part with. On top was the Cinderella costume, which he reached for.
The trunk lid slammed closed, just missing Cole’s fingers. He glanced at Olivia.
“Sorry,” she said, kneeling at the foot of the bed, holding the trunk closed while all gloriously rumpled. And gloriously nude. “You okay?”
“Private collection?” he asked.
She wrapped herself in the sheet they’d kicked to the foot of the bed. “Maybe I’ll take a glass of water after all,” she said.
In other words, Yes, asshole, private collection. Message received. Cole crossed the open space and hit the kitchen, filling up a glass of water, downing it in a few gulps before filling it again and bringing it to Olivia.
While she drank, he slid back into the bed with her. “Not exactly an open book,” he said.
She didn’t pretend to not know what he was talking about. She simply shrugged. “Old habits.”
He studied her face by the ambient candlelight flickering around the room. “You can tell me anything. You know that, right?”
“Nothing much to tell.”
Right.
One of their phones was going off; he could hear it vibrating across her nightstand. He lifted his head and found it was hers.
It said: DICKWAD CALLING—DON’T ANSWER!
He glanced at Olivia. She did not meet his gaze. “Ignore it,” she said.
A minute later, another call came in. This time the screen read: EVIL QUEEN CALLING—DON’T ANSWER!
He was starting to see a pattern.
Olivia’s hand came into view, and she scooped the phone from under his nose and brought it to her nose. “Damn,” she said.
And then she tossed the phone across the room, where it landed in her laundry basket.
“Nice shot,” he said.
“Yeah, I make that shot a lot. The trick is remembering to rescue the phone before I do laundry.”
“Expensive mistake,” he noted.
“Tell me about it. I’m on phone number three this year already.” She rolled away from him and started to climb out of the bed. “Listen, I need to get up early, so you should probably go.”
He pinned her on her belly, letting the erotic feel of her beneath him take over from everything else.
She blew hair from her face, craned her neck, and narrowed her eyes at him. “What’s with the caveman hold? I think we’ve both had our jollies here tonight, so we can consider ourselves over the whole ‘I’m yours’ thing, right?”
“Wrong.” He rocked his hips against her sweet ass.
A soft moan escaped her, and her eyes softened momentarily, until her phone began vibrating again.
“How much you want to bet it’s another ‘Don’t Answer’?” he asked.
She turned her head so he couldn’t see her expression.
Ah. The brick wall. He was getting good at bashing his head up against it. “So who’s Dickwad?” Lowering his head, he brushed his scruffy jaw against the nape of her neck.
She shivered. She liked. So he did it again. “Olivia?”
“No one important.”
Uh-huh. Whoever he was, he was important enough to label. “And the Evil Queen?”
“Wrong number.”
He laughed softly. “Such a beautiful liar.” Scooping her hair aside, he pressed his lips to the spot. “I bet I could get you to tell me all your secrets, Supergirl.”
“They’re not very interesting,” she said, and then hissed in a breath when he nibbled his way down her spine, the sound muffled against the pillow, like she was pressing her face hard into it so he couldn’t hear her.
But he wanted to hear her. “I think everything about you is interesting,” he said, and when she growled at his hold, he merely spread her legs with one of his thighs. And then made room for the other.
“I said I have to go to sleep,” she muttered, but she pushed her ass into his crotch.
And then it was his turn to groan.
One hand braced at her shoulder, holding the bulk of his weight off her, he slid his other beneath her and cupped a soft, warm breast.
Her nipple immediately tightened and pressed into his palm.
“Okay,” she said panting. “Fine. You’ve got ten minutes.”
“I can do a lot with ten minutes,” he said. And then he proved it.
Chapter 17
It was a sneaky, cowardly thing to do, but Olivia got up before dawn and…left.
Yeah. She left her own place, with Cole in her bed and her phone still in her laundry basket.
She stopped at the Eat Me diner for coffee, hit up the bakery for a croissant, and then wasted more time by walking the pier, telling herself she needed the exercise.
She didn’
t. She’d burned a bazillion calories riding Cole like a bronco all night…Just remembering burned a bunch more.
The sun came up behind the mountains, highlighting the choppy water. She watched awhile longer while finishing her coffee and croissant and then went back home.
Cole was gone.
She’d thought she’d be relieved, but she was something else entirely.
Disappointed. In herself, not him. She’d long ago decided that as Olivia she was going to be a better version of herself, and she had been.
Until this morning.
By the time she showered, dressed, grabbed her phone, and got out the door—for the second time—she was having a hard time maintaining her distance about the night she’d just had.
What had Cole thought when he’d woken alone? And why did she care? He wanted to know more about her, and she got that. She wanted to know about him, too. But she didn’t want to share her past with him, not now.
Not ever, if she could help it.
Not because she didn’t trust him. As ridiculous as it sounded, she already trusted him. There was just something about him that instilled a boatload of trust.
But with that came a healthy dose of reality. She’d learned the hard way not to give too much of herself. Nothing good came from it. She needed to remember that.
Just a little bit longer with him, the devil on her left shoulder begged. Oh, please.
You shouldn’t, the angel on her right shoulder said, clearly worried. Guard your past, walk away.
Olivia’s heart clutched. She knew she couldn’t keep her distance, couldn’t resist him.
But tick-tock, the clock was counting down. She knew it. Behind that easygoing, laid-back nature of Cole’s, he was sharp as a fox. And intense. He had questions, and he wanted answers.
He was going to complicate the world she’d built for herself. He was going to huff and puff, and if she wasn’t careful, he was going to blow her carefully constructed house down.
Right around her ears.
Even as she thought it, her evil, evil phone buzzed in her pocket, and she took a look. Not a DON’T ANSWER this time, but Becca. “Hey,” Olivia said, cradling the phone in the crook of her neck as she unlocked the door to her shop.
“You missed mine and Callie’s impromptu breakfast. Did you get my text?”
“I did,” Olivia said, walking inside, flipping on lights and the heater. “Sorry. I was…busy.”
“Doing?”
“Uh…” Shit. She kept forgetting that friends, the real ones, liked the details. “Going through stock, getting the shop ready for Halloween, stuff like that.”
“Oh,” Becca said. “Because Callie and I thought maybe you were busy doing something else.” She paused meaningfully. “Like, say…someone else.”
Olivia went still. “Um.” Her brain started racing. “Why would you think such a thing?”
“Because we both saw Cole leave your place earlier. He was whistling, by the way.”
“He was fixing my…” What? “Stuff,” she said, then grimaced. Lame.
“Yeah?” Becca asked, sounding amused. “Is that what put that smile on his face? Fixing your stuff?”
Olivia closed her eyes and thunked her head to the front countertop. It did not knock any sense into her.
“Because in my humble opinion,” Becca went on, not sounding all that humble actually, “a smile like the one Cole was wearing screams ‘just got lucky.’”
In Olivia’s ear came the welcome beep telling her she had another call. “I gotta go.”
“I bet.”
“No, really. I’ve got another call.”
“Uh-huh,” Becca said drily. “Later.”
Olivia disconnected and eyed the screen to see who was calling her.
BEST LOVER YOU’VE EVER HAD—ANSWER.
She stared at it for a moment and then burst out laughing. She had no idea when Cole had managed to get ahold of her phone and program himself in, but she had to give him creativity points. She connected. “Someone a little full of themselves this morning?”
“And yet you don’t deny the Best Lover Ever claim,” he noted, voice low and playful.
Damn, she was cheesing from ear to ear. She tried to curtail the stupid grin but couldn’t. “Why are you calling?” she asked, walking around and adjusting some of the Halloween decorations that she’d put up earlier in the week. She was thinking she could use some more. One could never have enough Halloween decorations. “Didn’t I just see you?”
“Ouch. And yes. I need a favor. I’ve got this thing I’ve got to attend Friday night. Was hoping you’d come with.”
Friday was three nights away, and Halloween. “Define thing,” she said warily. A date? Yes, they’d slept together, but that hadn’t exactly been a planned thing. A date would take them to yet another level, and she wasn’t sure she was ready for that.
“Suspicious much?” he asked, sounding amused. “I can see the wheels turning from here. Just say yes, Olivia.”
“I don’t think—”
“It’s a Halloween gig. Costume required.”
Excitement trumped reluctance. She loved to wear costumes. Loved. And he knew it. She eyed the rack of costumes she had displayed, already imagining at least three she wanted for herself. “You know,” she said casually, “that whole bossy thing you’ve got going was fun in bed, but it’s not as much fun in real life.”
“Okay,” he said. “Say yes, please.”
She let out a short laugh. He was a quick learner.
“I promise you a good time,” he said in that low, sexy voice, the one that had coaxed her right out of her shell last night and had her doing whatever he’d wanted.
And loving it.
Shaking her head, she walked through the shop to her office and flipped on a few more lights. The one over her desk actually went on and stayed on as it had all week now and she had to smile. “Fine,” she said. “Yes.”
“Was it me, or the fact that you get to wear a costume?”
“Do you really want to know?”
He laughed softly, so damn sure of himself. “I know it was me.”
She told herself she didn’t have time for this, or him. Her voice mail was filled with calls from the TV Land producer, her mom, her sister…All wanting their piece of her. A little bit of her after-sex glow eroded. She needed to stand firm. Because if she didn’t, if she caved and did this for them, they’d take what they needed and they’d leave her.