Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,110

evidence of her efforts. Her eagerness. And in the middle of the afternoon, too. Just because he had called.

“Hi,” he said back. He gestured toward the seat across from him. “Take a load off.”

She slid in, folding her body neatly to do so, tucking the back of her dress under her bottom. He could not help it: He pictured her ass naked, the way it looked when she was walking away from the bed to get dressed, and he was still lying there, raised up on one elbow, savoring the sight of her round, saucy ass. A bit of a bounce to it when she walked.

He shook his head, hoping the memory would slide out of there and leave him alone. Not a good way to begin this kind of conversation.

“Glad you were free today,” he said. “To meet me.”

“You could’ve come by the house,” she said, and they both knew what that meant. “Frank’s out of town all week. Some kind of a sales conference. Somewhere. I don’t care, really. As long as he’s gone.”

“Yeah,” Harm said, because he could not, in the moment, think of anything else to say. The picture of her, bare-assed naked, would not leave. He did not think he could get through this unless he got rid of the image. “Look, Vivian—”

“Oh, I don’t like any sentence that begins like that!’ she said, with a merry, twitchy, nervous little laugh. “That can’t be good! ‘Look, Vivian’ sounds like one of my teachers back in grade school.” She flashed him a naughty smile. “Have I been a bad girl, Mr. Strayer? Have I been a bad, bad girl? Are you going to have to take me over your knee and—”

“Stop it, okay?”

The irritation in his voice startled her. Her eyes widened. He thought, for a terrifying moment, that she was going to cry.

But it was the opposite: She was annoyed. She had gone from flirtatious to angry, just like that. Her rapid-fire mood changes had, once upon a time, intrigued him, aroused him. She was like her own little weather system, compact and self-contained; you never knew what you would be dealing with, from minute to minute, and the need to react to that, to turn on a dime, had excited him.

“Okay, then,” she said. Neutral now. “What’s up?”

What’s up? That was her way of saying: Two can play at this game. She sounded like a bored gas station attendant leaning in the driver’s window. Check your oil, too, bub?

“I don’t think we should see each other anymore.” There. He’d said it.

She did not blink. She did not shriek. She said, “Well, that’ll be tough. This is a small town. We’re bound to ‘see each other,’ as you put it, every now and again.”

“You know what I mean.”

She looked out the window. It was a gray February day. February was not a good month for Norbitt; the dingy color of the sky seemed to leak into the town itself, into the old buildings and the streets.

“Yeah.” She turned back to look at him. “I know what you mean.”

The waitress showed up. Harm waved her away. “Still making up our minds,” he said to her, and he smiled, not wanting her to get the idea that he was in the midst of any kind of confrontation here, because news of that would be all over town in an hour. The waitress smiled back. More importantly, she left.

“So,” Vivian said pertly. “How do you want to do this?”

He was not prepared for that. “I don’t know what you—”

“I mean,” she said, “do we just say good-bye right here and now, or do I get some sort of explanation? Did I do something wrong, Harm? Did I pester you, ask you for a lot of expensive gifts? Demand too much of your precious, precious time? Was that it? Or was it something else? Was it—” She stopped. She snapped her fingers. “Is this about that time you couldn’t perform, poor baby, and I was a bit on the needy side, and so maybe I said something that you found a little demeaning, a little insulting and belittling, you big, strong war hero, you…”

“Vivian.” He knew about this side of her, the cruelty, the shallowness. He had seen her unsheathe it in front of other people. And when he saw that, he had known it was only a matter of time until she turned on him, too. He understood how selfish she was. In the beginning, it had fascinated