Forbidden Harmony (Harmony Falls #3) - Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,90
she left the kitchen. He grabbed a bowl from the cupboard and the leftover food from the fridge. He was hungry, but he’d mostly asked to eat as a way to distract Addie.
He’d prepared himself to listen to Addison cry and moan about selling her wedding dress, but now that she was refusing to tell him anything, he was oddly upset by it. He didn’t like the idea of her using sex with him as a distraction from her life.
You want it to mean something more?
No, of course not. But as hard as he tried to deny it, she was already becoming more to him than just a warm place to put his dick. Right or wrong, he wanted to be more to her too.
* * *
“How was your day?” Preacher said.
Addison stared blankly at him. He ate a spoonful of chili and said, “What did you do today?”
“Not much,” she said. “Talked to Harper, cleaned the apartment.”
Don’t forget selling your wedding dress for a measly six hundred bucks. Oh, hey, you know you’re gonna be alone forever, right? Even if you learn how to be better at sex, you’ll never find someone. You’re going to die old and alone surrounded by yarn and seventy-two cats.
“You sure you don’t want to talk about what’s upsetting you?” Preacher said.
She would die before she let Preacher hear how pathetic she really was. Hell, she’d been tempted not to let him into her apartment because of how blotchy her face was, but sex would be a great distraction from her self-pity.
If she could get Preacher into the freaking bedroom.
“I’m sure.” She glanced at his bowl. “Are you finished?”
“Almost.”
She looked at the clock, trying to hide her sigh of impatience.
“My day was fine,” Preacher said.
“That’s good.” Maybe if she took off her bra and waved it at him, he’d get the hint.
“The new guy, Nix, seems to be working out okay. But he’s from New Cassel so we’ll see if he can stick it out. It can be hard going from a city to a small town.”
“Do you ever wish you still lived there?” Despite how much she just wanted to bang Preacher and forget about her pathetic life for a little while, her curiosity about Preacher’s life was kicking in. She knew nothing about him other than he was originally from New Cassel. She would be an idiot not to take advantage of his weirdly chatty mood.
“Nah. I like small town life. Once Gideon moved back here, he encouraged me to move here too. I was trying to open a shop in New Cassel, but it” he paused for a beat, “wasn’t working out. Gideon convinced me to open a shop here instead.”
“It seems to have worked out well for you,” she said.
“I do okay.”
She laughed. “You do better than okay, and you know it.”
He grinned at her. “Hell, yeah, I do.”
“How did you and Gideon meet?”
“He came into the shop I was working at and I did his tattoo.”
“So, just completely random,” she said.
He nodded and she smiled a little. “It’s weird to me to think about meeting your best friend in some random kind of way. I’ve been friends with Harper since we were kids.”
“You live your whole life in Harmony Falls?” Preacher ate the last bite of chili before setting the empty bowl on the coffee table and picking up his glass of water.
“I have. Pretty boring, I know, but both my parents grew up in Harmony Falls and they never had any desire to leave. They wanted Daniel and me to have the same childhood they had. And honestly, I have no real urge to leave either. I love it here, always have. Harper has an adventurous spirit, but I’m a homebody. Plus, I’m pretty close to my mom and the thought of living more than half an hour from her makes me sad.”
“What about your old man? You like him?” Preacher said.
“I do. He’s an engineer and the last ten years or so he’s travelled a lot for work, but he’s a good dad and I love him. What about you? Are you close to your parents?”
“No.”
He didn’t say anything else and while she wasn’t that surprised, she wished he would give her a little something more.
As if he’d read her mind, he said, “My old man was in and out of prison a lot when I was a kid and my mom was too busy shooting heroin to care much about what I was doing.”