Seconds ran into minutes, and still they lay, quiet and tender in one another’s arms.
He didn’t want the moment to end.
“Dez?”
“Mmm?”
“My arm’s asleep.”
He shifted off her, rolling to his side, giving her a sleepy satisfied grin. “Sorry.”
She smiled at him. “You were right.”
“About what?”
“Dirty is so much fun.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“THESE ARE DELICIOUS,” Eleanor said, scooping up a forkful of scrambled eggs, and sighing.
“They’re just eggs,” Dez said, clad in nothing but orange boxers bearing little green palm trees. His bare feet had small tufts of hair, which she thought pretty sexy. If, you know, a gal was into thinking feet were sexy. Normally she wasn’t, but at that moment, everything about Dez was sexy, including the way he stirred scrambled eggs.
“But they’re really good.”
“You’re just famished from all the sex we had.”
Eleanor laughed. “Probably. And I’ve never heard a guy use the word famish.”
“I minored in English lit. Thought it would come in handy as a lyricist. I know lots of words. Big vocabulary along with my big—”
“Ego?” she finished, eyeing his buns in the fairly fitted boxers.
Dez flashed a smile. “Among other things.”
“So where did you go to college? I never heard you talk about it.”
He scraped fluffy eggs onto a plate, grabbed a fork and joined her at the table. “I went to LSU for two years before dropping out to go on the road and do session work.”
For the next few minutes they chatted about college and the things they loved and didn’t about the traditional classroom. Eleanor loved talking with Dez because he was a good listener. Skeeter had been a brilliant conversationalist, but never really listened. He always seemed to be thinking of his own next point, so it was refreshing to sit at the breakfast table and carry on inane conversation with no overtones.
Of course she wanted to ask, “What now?” but she didn’t want reality to intrude upon the perfection of the night...and early morning. It was as if they’d wrapped themselves in an invisibility cloak, and disrupting the folds in any way might drop it to the floor, leaving them naked and exposed.
And not in a good way.
Dez cleaned his plate and eyed hers. She slid it toward him and he finished it off.
“So tell me about Skeeter.”
Eleanor nearly choked. If that wasn’t a slap of reality, she didn’t know what was.
“Skeeter?”
“Your husband. I was in Houston when all that went down, so clue me in.”
“I thought you didn’t need to know about him.” She didn’t want to talk about her late husband. Or Blakely. Or the fact she had to take a quiche to the Young Women’s Business Owners Open House later that night. Reality knocked and she didn’t want to relinquish the small world in which they’d existed for the past ten hours.
Dez shrugged. “I don’t. If you don’t want to talk about your past, that’s cool.”
Eleanor set down her mug. “It’s not that I don’t want to talk about Skeeter—well, actually I don’t—but that whole mess made me raw and it still...”
“Chafes?” His gaze probed hers.
“Yeah, but I’m over Skeeter if that’s what you’re asking. No grieving widow here.”
“I didn’t ask if you were still in love with your husband. I asked what happened between you two. At some point, we have to decide about us. Understanding what you went through might help us figure out how to proceed.”
How to proceed? How would her past help her with her future with Dez? Skeeter’s murder-suicide had nothing to do with them.
Irrational panic knocked on the door of her mind. A future with Dez didn’t compute. Didn’t make sense. Scared the woolies out of her. “Maybe we shouldn’t proceed.”
His eyes shuttered and he turned his body slightly away from her. “So this was a one-night stand?”
She stared at her coffee mug. “I don’t know. I mean, I—” She grappled for the right words, but they weren’t there. Eleanor had no experience with doing the morning-after thing, and she hadn’t really thought beyond having sex with Dez.
His eyes gave her nothing to go on.
Eleanor hated the sudden discomfort hanging between them. “I don’t know. I’ve never done this.”
“Were you just using me?”
“Oh, God, no.” She grabbed his hand, wanting him to understand she’d never see what she shared with him as tawdry.
He pushed his plate toward the center of the table and folded his arms. “So tell me about Skeeter.”
“I don’t want to talk about Skeeter.”
“Too bad.” Dez’s jaw set and his eyes no longer resembled gray flannel.