onto his back again. “Now get back in bed with me.”
Before doing that, she went to snag a blanket from the closet and spread it over the bed. Turner held it up for her as she slid back in beside him. Rather than lie down, she sat up to look at him.
“What you’re saying is you trust me to take all of those things into account,” she said. “But our future shouldn’t be just my decision.”
“Baby, if I can get it, you can have it.”
Skootching closer, she laid a hand on his abs. “What if what I want is to make you happy?”
He laced their fingers together. “You already do.”
“Okay, and you make me happy,” she said, watching their digits twine. “So we should just stay here forever. Nothing ever changes.”
“If that’s what you want.”
Growling in frustration, she yanked her hand away and sighed at the stars. “He’s driving me insane.”
Taking her by surprise, his arms came around her and he swooped her down onto her back, capturing her mouth with his. Okay, so the kiss was good to distract her, but still they hadn’t resolved anything.
“He wants you to be happy,” Turner murmured against her lips. “Will you ever tell me to abandon my family?” She shook her head, which wasn’t easy while it was buried in the deep pillow. “Will you ever ask me to hurt them?”
“No, of course, I would never—”
“Do you think I want you to be unhappy?”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t deny you anything I have, but I have limits. I can’t give you a fancy house and acres of land. If that’s what you want, we’ll live here. It won’t be our own place and might complicate our sex life… We’ll figure it out, if it’s what you want…”
“I want to live in the Venture.”
His brow dropped. “In the Venture?” She nodded, thinking it was odd that others in his family knew that before he did. “What about Grammie?”
“If she wants to live with us, she can,” Poppy teased. “She’ll be able to afford rent, whatever it is.”
“I thought you’d want to be here with her.”
“I love Grammie, but I want to build a life with you. That life isn’t here, it’s in the Venture… Unless there’s a reason you don’t want me there.”
He kissed her. “The Venture’s as much yours as mine.”
“Then we go back to our life. We get Holden out of the way and go back to the way things were.”
“The way things were,” he murmured. “Your floors aren’t finished.”
“Geez, still?” she mocked. “What’s Ritchie doing over there?”
“Everything he can,” he said, exhaling and rolling away. “It’s been less than a week. Naught’s helping him out…”
“But you feel guilty,” she said, lying on her side next to him, resting her hand in the center of his chest. “This is the stuff we need to be talking about.”
“You have enough to worry about.”
“And I wouldn’t admit I loved you when you showed up here because I thought you had enough on your plate without adding me to it. Remember you said how I shouldn’t throw up obstacles because you’re so good at it? Both of us have to stop it. We have to stop assuming we know what’s best for each other and talk to each other instead.”
“Okay,” he said. “You’ve gotta realize I’m a guy who looks at what’s right there in front of him. I deal with one thing at a time. I don’t make plans for later or tomorrow, ‘cept maybe meeting the guys in Naughtie’s and there’s always a maybe over that. If something else comes up, beer gets bumped down the list. My big picture is limited to whatever’s next on the list, something needs fixed, the girls need something. My goals are minute to minute, not year to year.”
“You have the Venture.”
“Venture gets squeezed in whenever there’s a minute to breathe. I’ve never worked on a unit the way I worked on yours.”
Just like she suspected, her moving in when she did caused problems for him. “Hmm,” Poppy exhaled and lay down again.
He wasn’t revealing any big secret, she knew he was a busy guy with a lot on his plate. It just hadn’t really occurred to her that maybe he wasn’t revealing his desires for the future because he’d never actually got around to considering what that picture might look like.
No one in his life anticipated her. Least of all Turner. He hadn’t been looking for a girlfriend or a life, which was why he’d pushed her away