they were pretty pajamas with little suns on them and I loved them.
The storm had not stopped. Rain fell in sheets on the windows. Outside it was just a swirl of gray. I looked down out the window and wondered if there was a chance this house might slip right off this mountain.
I wondered if I’d slipped off a mountain.
I’m married.
I watched the rain fall into a dense cloud of mist, where it just vanished.
I’m a married woman.
It was one thing to lie about my name…but I’d just made Dylan a participant in adultery. I swallowed and rested my head against the window. And tried, really, really hard, to convince myself that it didn’t matter. What Dylan didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.
But it mattered.
And I knew it.
I put on a pair of thick socks I’d found in the top drawer and made my way back across the house and then slipped through the cracked door into his dark garage.
The light was on over his bench, and he sat there in a pair of jeans and boots and nothing else.
He was beautiful, his skin dusted with gold under that light. His muscles flexed and shifted under that skin.
“Dylan?” I said, standing on the cement stoop, three steps up from the floor of his garage.
“You’re awake,” he said. He didn’t turn, the muscles of his arms twitching faster as he finished what he was working on. “Just…one more second.”
In that minute, I honestly didn’t breathe.
But then he turned around, and I blew out my breath as coolly as I could before I got light-headed.
“I was tired.” Awesome. Awesome response. “It was a long night.”
“Sure.”
He was still looking at me. Not quite smiling. Not quite not smiling, either. It made me nervous, that look. Like I was something he was slowly taking apart and putting back together, over and over.
“So…what is all this stuff?” I looked around his garage because I didn’t know what else to do.
“All this stuff is cars,” he said. “Those are tires. Anything else you’re unfamiliar with?”
Oh…I couldn’t. I was too raw for teasing now. “I’m…I’m not…I haven’t done this.”
“Fucked a guy and then talked about cars?”
The laugh barked out of me.
He crossed the room and climbed the three steps, his eyes on mine, burning away the embarrassment and insecurity until all that was left was my heartbeat in my chest and the heat in his eyes.
“Hey,” he said and kissed me lightly on the mouth. Just enough. Just enough that I could taste him. The salt and spice. He’d brushed his teeth and had coffee. I could taste all of him on his lips.
“Hey,” I whispered and kissed him back. Wishing I’d had coffee and brushed my teeth.
He stepped back. “Nice pajamas. I like the suns.” He reached out and touched one of them on the front of my thigh and just like that, I was ready. I was hot and damp and…ready.
“So,” I said, stepping back for just a little distance. “What’s going on here?”
“I fix cars.” He took his own distance, taking the steps down to the floor.
He was being evasive—I knew, because that’s how we were with each other. So, I slowly gathered all those things I knew about him, the crumbs he’d left, and I followed him down the steps to the floor.
“You fix cars and go to parties in tuxedos. You live on a cliff in a beautiful house—”
“Don’t come down here,” he said. “You don’t have shoes.”
He was wearing steel-toed boots. Boots and no shirt.
I glanced down at my feet in the thick wool socks I’d found. My toes were curled over the edge of that cement step, like I was about ready to jump.
“You told me people pay you a lot of money for something stupid.”
“I fix cars.”
“You’re telling me you’re the best-paid mechanic in the world?”
He laughed and glanced over his shoulder at me. “Yeah. Sorta.”
“Dylan…” Please, I wanted to say. Throw the girl whose mind you just scrambled with what will undoubtedly be the best sex of her life a bone. “We just had sex.” What a stupid, inadequate word for what had passed between us. “And I know nothing about you!”
“That’s not true. We…” His throat bobbed and this cavern, this great cathedral of space, shrank to nothing. To zero, and I could hear his heartbeat. The sound of his swallow. “We know plenty about each other.”
Heat exploded between us. His beautiful, scarred lips, my scarred knees. Every car and machine between us—it just incinerated.