Love In Secrets (Love Distilled #3) - Scarlett Cole Page 0,53
She couldn’t help it. “You’re so silly.”
“I’ll show you silly.” He lifted her onto the table and kissed her soundly.
The door burst open. “I forgot my damn phone. I’m so stupid I—”
“Hey, Em,” Jake said casually.
“What? . . . I . . . Are you? You know what. I don’t think I want to know,” Em said in one long garbled sentence.
The door closed.
Cassie looked at Jake, then back at the door, as her heart pounded in her chest. It was everything she had been dreading. “She looked pissed.”
Jake pressed a gentle kiss to Cassie’s lips before lifting her to the ground. “Nah. She looks at me like that all the time. I’ll talk to her and make it right, I promise.”
His words were meant to reassure her it was going to be okay.
But somehow, they didn’t.
11
“She’s been avoiding eye contact with me,” Cassie said as Jake pulled up outside Anders’s home.
Jake shook his head. “Emerson has not been avoiding eye contact with you. You’re expecting her to freak out, so you’re looking for signs that she is. I’m twenty-nine, you’re thirty-one. Don’t you think our days of caring what my sister says are over?”
“Have you met your sister? Even when we were little, she was the sane voice of reason. She’s the reason you didn’t climb up the tree with a hacksaw and rubber gloves to cut down that hornets’ nest. The reason Olivia didn’t cut off her hair and dye it purple just before the school nativity concert. And she’s the reason Carter only lost sensation in his pinky finger instead of having his entire hand being severed off after that whole hoist system you guys tried to create to get furniture into the tree house.”
“Valid points. But in fairness, those were all really dumb ideas.” He brought her hand to his lips. He loved how smooth her skin was. “This is not a dumb idea. It might well be the best idea we’ve ever had.”
He’d been doing that a lot. Talking as if this was a lot more than the month of wonderful they’d agreed to. It worried her, even as butterflies took flight in her stomach at his sweet words. “Fine, but I’m going to let you do the talking. You’re the one who will be here to face the music when I go back to New York.”
Jake grinned at her. “She invited you to join us at our weekly family dinner, Cass. Not to participate in the second Spanish Inquisition. You think she’s going to interrogate us?”
Cassie looked toward the house and bit the side of her thumbnail. “I don’t know. I never thought we’d end up here, so who knows what she’ll do.”
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get in there. And for the record, I’m going to hold your hand and possibly put my arm over the back of your chair. I might even steal a kiss. And you’re not going to act as if I gave you cooties.”
She turned back to him and he saw a flash of fire in her eyes. “I hope you aren’t instructing me on how to behave, because that’s so wrong.”
“I’m not instructing you on anything. I’m putting it out there that if we are going to take the flack for starting this, we may as well get the enjoyment out of it. What’s the point of getting a lecture from Emerson and not being able to kiss it all better?”
“I thought we aren’t going to get a lecture from Emerson.”
“We aren’t.”
“So, there’ll be nothing to kiss better.”
Jake kissed her cheek. “Stop. You’re smarter than me, and any minute you’re going to trip me up, and then you’re going to shout ‘Ha’ or something similar and then point out all the ways I screwed up. Can we skip straight to the part where you say it’s okay, and then I don’t feel like I’m walking on eggshells with my family and you all night?”
Cassie grinned. “Fine. Seeing as you admitted I’m smarter.”
“You are. Better looking too.”
“I don’t think so, but I’ll take it. Keep going and you might get laid later.”
“You also have the hottest pussy known to man. I could spend days—”
“Okay. Stop.” Cassie’s laughter filled the truck, and all Jake wanted to do was stay right there and talk and laugh with her all night. “Let’s go in.”
After all their joking in the car, Jake was relieved when, as they waited for someone to open the door, Cassie slipped her hand into his.