I was bouncing from subject to subject, my mind unable to hold a thought.
He pulled away and looked at me. “Sorry?”
“I’m twenty-seven years old and I’ve never had a boyfriend. I’m a total, f**king freak. I don’t know what to do with you. Even though I’ve semi-gotten over the whole Vance Crowe, badass, super-cool, macho-man, danger-seeker gig, that still, like, flips me out, by the way, now I don’t know how to be normal. I don’t know what to do. Auntie Reba would tell me.”
Vance was staring at me like he didn’t know what to do either but was leaning towards a call to the doctor.
“I need to call Nick,” I announced, “I have to tell him I love him.”
“It’s barely six o’clock in the morning.”
“He’s an early riser.”
“Jules, I think he knows you love him.”
I stared at him and narrowed my eyes. “Are you sure?”
He grinned at me. “Pretty much.”
I nodded my head decisively once. “Okay then,” I said.
Vance kept watching me closely.
Finally he asked, “Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not all right. I’m stupid. I’m totally clueless. I’m a mess. I’m a freak. I thought we’d already established that.”
His grin faded and the atmosphere in the room went electric. I’d been relaxed even though I was crying; my body was using his for strength and warmth. I tensed when the room changed because he’d tensed in fact he went solid as a rock.
His arms went from around me and he pulled the ponytail holder out of the mess of hair at the top of my head and then twisted, tossing it on the nightstand.
The he came back to me.
When he did even in the dim light I saw his eyes were intense, more intense than usual, burning into me. His hands slid through my hair at the sides of my head, his fingers combing through it all the way down my back. His hands came up again, to either side of my head, holding it in position to look at him, his thumbs coming forward and wiping away my tears. I got the impression he did all this as an effort at control. What he was trying to control, I did not know but I was about to find out.
“You’re a woman who lost her family, all of her family, and did what she had to do to keep going. There’s not one f**kin’ thing stupid or clueless about that.”
“Crowe –”
He interrupted me. “I hear you call yourself that again, it’s gonna piss me off.”
Um.
Yikes.
He already sounded pissed off.
“Are you angry with me?” I whispered.
He ignored my question and carried on. “If you’d given yourself to someone else, you wouldn’t be mine. And that would seriously piss me off.”
Okay, now he sounded seriously pissed off.
“Crowe –” I tried again.
“Far as I can see with the time she had, your aunt did a f**kin’ great job with you and left you in the hands of a man who handled you with care. I can understand you miss her but if she was alive, she’d be proud of who you’ve become.”
Oh my God.