had to figure out characters before she played them. She wanted to know what made a person tick. He worked the same way when it came to his job.
He nodded. “Yeah. It’s my uncle’s cabin.”
“Uh oh. You spilled the secret.” She looked around the interior of the car. “Will you have to kill me now?” she whispered.
He shook his head. “Not even funny.”
She smacked his thigh, all fun and games. “Oh, sure it is. You just have a miniscule sense of humor when it comes to me getting whacked. Hey, I can understand that, but we can’t make fun of me getting killed if I’m dead, so we may as well do it when I’m alive and we can laugh about it.”
Troy searched for the logic and couldn’t find it. He shook his head. “I can’t...” Just the thought made him sick. “I can’t laugh about it.” Sure, she wanted to lighten the mood, and it was the whole reason they were thousands of miles away from home, but it wasn’t a laughing matter. He opened his mouth to tell her exactly that, but caught the new look on her face. Her smile had vanished.
“Here’s the thing.” Her voice was soft and shaky as she unwrapped her last piece of chocolate. “I don’t live in the past, and I do my best to plan for the future, but I live in the now.” She shrugged. “The fact is, I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or next week or ten minutes from now.” Tears filled her eyes, but she blinked them back. “So I joke because I can. Because I like to make people laugh.” She met his gaze and the corner of her lips lifted. “I especially like to make you laugh.” Troy’s chest got tight. “I have no control of the big things in life. I only have control of the little things. I may not always be politically correct and sometimes my timing is off...and sometimes the subject matter is way too grim for comedy. But if I don’t crack a joke then I might cry and that simply sucks a big one.”
Despite the ache in his chest, Troy grinned.
She winked at him. “So we’ll work on your comedy and you’ll be laughing at the macabre in no time.” She popped the chocolate into her mouth.
The fresh twinkle in her eyes bowled him over. “Will we?” She made him smile, made him want to be as lighthearted as she was. Problem was, he didn’t know how to be that person. But he wanted to be. More than anything else in the world, he wanted to be the guy Julie Fraser smiled at, laughed with and went to bed with for the rest of time.
Tall order. He would’ve rolled his eyes if she hadn’t been looking at him so intently.
“Yes, we will,” she said in answer to his question. She’d settled back in her seat almost sideways so she faced him with one leg bent up against her chest, her bad leg stretched out. She had the softest, sexiest look in her eyes. Just that fast, a vision of her tied down to the bed flashed through his mind. Her arms tied over her head, her legs bound, spread eagle. All that soft skin and toned muscle. Blood rushed south and his jeans got tighter behind the zipper. A lot tighter. He had the urge to pull over and make love to her in the backseat of his car.
“What else?” she asked. “I want to know more about you.”
He should’ve seen it coming, right? He was a P.I. for God’s sake. He went with the old standby. “There’s not much to tell.”
“Where did you move to when you were nine?” She looked so fucking interested, so excited to hear more, as if she needed this information to be happy. How could he deny her?
“New Jersey.”
“Did you like it?”
He shrugged. “It was okay. Not great.” He’d been miserable. He’d missed his mom. “I missed my home, my uncle and my friends.” Without family, there’d been no shield from his dad. His mom had always been the buffer. Troy shook off the mental cloud. If he didn’t direct this conversation where he wanted it to go, he’d end up spilling way more than he ever planned. “I liked Sandy Hook. I could get lost there all day, looking for seashells or sand crabs and not have to worry about being underfoot at home or pissing off my dad.” Or