shed just as we come to it. Adri instantly drops my hand. “Everything all set down there?” she asks.
Adri nods, still heading toward the parking lot. “Mr. Davidson made a donation. It’s on the table.”
Theresa smiles at me. “The children thank you.”
“My pleasure,” I say, but Adri’s already halfway to the Lumina.
I follow her and she pulls up short when we reach it.
“Crap. This is yours.”
“Frank is in the shop,” I remind her. “What’s the problem?”
She holds out her hand. “Give me your keys.”
“Why?” I ask warily.
“Because you’re injured. I’m driving.”
“But I won the bet. I drive you home.”
She shakes her head adamantly. “You are not safe to drive. You could go into shock or something.”
I laugh for real this time. It strikes me that I can’t even remember the last time I laughed out loud. What this woman does for Sherm, she also seems to do for me. “I’m not going into shock. Look,” I say, turning my leg for her to see. “It’s not even bleeding anymore.”
“Give me the keys,” she demands, “or I’m calling an ambulance.”
I shake my head, hand over my keys.
She unlocks the doors. I adjust my jeans around my growing erection as I slide into the passenger seat. We fall into a charged silence as she navigates the Lumina through town to her house.
She’s not going to resist. She’ll give me what I want when we get there. I can read it all over her.
And then I’ll be able to focus again.
Chapter 16
Adri
It’s not until I make the turn onto my road that I remember I can’t just drive up to my house with Rob, larger than life, in the passenger seat.
I feel my face get even hotter. I threw a dart at him. In my defense, he was totally distracting me, and I warned him not to stand there, but still. And now, to top off my total mortification, I have to sneak him into my house like a teenager.
I take a deep breath and can’t bring myself to look at Rob as I say, “I need you to get down.”
“Excuse me?”
“Just slouch down a little, okay?” I know he’s looking at me like I’m crazy, and I feel my face pull into a self-conscious cringe.
“What’s this all about?”
I take a breath and turn to him. “My neighbor reports everything back to my dad.”
A sexy smirk breaks over his face. “And a strange man at your house is going to be hard to explain?”
An incredibly sexy strange man. I press a hand to my face. “Sorry. This is stupid. I’ll just take you home.”
He adjusts the seat all the way back and lifts his knees, pressing them into the dash and scooching as low as his six-three frame can manage. “Okay?”
“Sorry,” I say again, but I start rolling slowly up the street. I wave at Sergeant Dixon, who’s sitting on his porch with his golden retriever, then drive up our driveway to the garage in back.
“Coast is clear,” I say once we’re stopped out of Sergeant Dixon’s line of sight.
Rob sits up and pushes out his door, looking at the white stucco house with an amused glint in his eye. “That felt like a reverse getaway.”
I lead him up the short walkway to the back door, where I turn the key. We step through into the kitchen, and I’m glad I did the dishes before I left for work this morning.
“Come on.” I take his hand and tow him though the kitchen, but he pulls back as we pass the wall of Adri at the entrance to the hall.
I try not to cringe as he takes his time perusing school pictures as I progressed through the missing-front-teeth stage, to pimples, to braces, and finally high school graduation.
“That’s a lot of history,” he says, his eyes stalling on a shot of me hugging Chuck at eighth-grade graduation.
“Dad and Mom bought this house when they got married. Mom just kept adding to it,” I say with a wave of my hand at the wall. “Called it the wall of fame.”
He turns to face me, and everything inside me is at odds. I want to kiss him in the worst possible way. I want him to sweep me up and ravage me in my childhood bed. How can I feel this way about someone who won’t let himself show?
There’s still so much I want to know . . . about why Rob lied about their father, what brought them here, and why Rob’s so scared. He’s