Don't Go Stealing My Heart - Kelly Siskind Page 0,31
came banging on the door. When she realized I was home alone, about to start a fire, she called child services.”
“They took you from your mother?”
She stared dead ahead. “They didn’t care that she was the only family I had. Just ripped me out and tossed me in the foster system. Six or so months later, I got the news. She’d OD’d. Couldn’t handle life without me. All because I burned pasta sauce.” Although her voice had remained impassive, Clementine was all hard lines and edges, as though readying herself to withstand a blast of wind.
He couldn’t fathom what she’d endured, but her resilience was as fierce as her posture, and gratitude swamped him. Sharing this brittle piece of herself had taken trust. “I could tell you it’s not your fault, that a ten-year-old shouldn’t have to remember to stir her pasta sauce, but that won’t change the past.” When she remained impassive, he leaned toward her ear. “I don’t know what you’re like at work or how you live your life, but I see a strong woman who fixes cars and keeps pace with my superior jogging and who loves her bearded dragon unselfishly, even if she’s annoyingly secretive at times. If I had to guess, I’d say you’re not a woman who’s risen above her past. I’d say you’ve risen because of it.”
She closed her eyes and exhaled.
He frowned. Had he said the wrong thing? Of course he’d said the wrong thing. It was in his DNA to say the wrong thing to women. But when she faced him and opened her eyes, the glassiness and lift of her brow told him that just maybe this time he’d said something right.
“Tell me another secret,” she whispered.
This one left before he could contain it. “I want to kiss you.”
10
Clementine almost slid off her stool. Boneless. He’d turned her boneless with nothing but five words. No, not five. Every word he’d just offered had loosened the bitter hold she kept on her past. Lucien, the only other person who knew her story, had never given her that kind of salve. He’d told her to forget it, that it wasn’t her fault. That the system was to blame. Yet here was Jack, telling her to embrace her awful, not bury it. Accept what had happened, her fault or not, the system’s fault or not. Accept it and live with it and let it shape you.
Now he wanted to kiss her.
God, she wanted that, and so much more. To experience sex with someone who knew pieces of her puzzle, who didn’t pity her but lifted her up. If he got his skilled hands on her, she feared and thrilled at what could happen.
The burning desire shot her back in time, to them standing over his stalled Jaguar.
“You’re certainly good with your hands,” he’d said.
“Best if one of us is, or you’d be stuck waiting for a tow.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t good with my hands.”
“You can’t fix your own car.”
“I’m good at other things.”
Other things. What things? All the things? Some things? Which damn things? “You said you couldn’t ask me on a date,” she said, voice shaky. A pitiful attempt to force their distance.
She’d kissed marks on a job before. She would play up her prude innocence and nothing more would happen. Rich men, she’d learned, found a hard-to-get woman enticing. A change from gold-diggers hunting for prey. After locating her targeted loot, she’d then feign illness and thank her dates, never to return their calls. A week or month or two later, she’d sneak in and secure her score.
No residual guilt. No longing for what could have been.
Kissing Not-Maxwell Elvis Jack David would wreck her. She knew it. She wasn’t sure she could avoid it, or even worse, fight it.
“I did say that, didn’t I?” Jack mused, unaware of her turmoil. Or maybe he was aware. It was impossible to hide her trembling limbs. “But kissing isn’t dating, is it?”
“You’re suddenly forward.” As hard as Shy Jack was to resist, Bold Jack was proving more challenging.
“Thing is,” he said, back to drawing sexy bottle circles, not meeting her eyes. “I’m painfully awkward around beautiful women, which is why I’ve been curt with you at times and generally artless. But when I get comfortable with someone, when trust takes over the nerves”—he looked at her then, right into her eyes—“when that happens, the confidence I feel as Elvis on stage bleeds into my life.”