to stop for pleasantries, Dev’s awaiting coffee had been hot.
But today, she wasn’t running to keep up with the English muffins. Today, she had plenty of time to make his coffee fresh and put it in his mug. Today, she was brooding, poring over a magazine she pretended to read instead of jumping into their routine. When he cuffed his hand around a disposable paper cup, its temperature was ice cold.
“Thanks for the coffee,” he said, lifting the cup before taking a slow stride toward where she sat at the counter. Approaching a brooding Delilah gently was something he’d known how to do since he was a kid. You had to be careful—quiet and disarming and without even a whiff of attack. That only ever led to a fiercer fight.
“You look like Mom, sitting there like that.”
Once Dev got to where Delilah was sitting, he reached forward and pulled out the stool right next to hers. Its metal legs made a horrible sound on the concrete floor. Her eyes widened for a second—gaze still trained on the magazine—and her face took on a light flush.
“Which part? The rainbow dye job or the tattoo?”
Dev set both of his cups down before he sat. “Biting the inside of your lip when something’s eating at you. The way you get quiet when you’re mad.”
“I’m not mad,” she came back quickly, flipping her flint-gray eyes up to look at him for the first time.
“You’re not happy, either,” he pointed out.
“No…just disappointed.”
He smiled wanly, a bit of sadness and a bit of humor coloring his tone. “Uh-oh…now you really sound like mom.”
Delilah sighed, punctuating her gesture with the closing of her magazine. It was one of the cooking titles she always liked to read. This issue had a white cover with a red question mark fashioned out of a mosaic of different foods. It was the same one he’d seen on Shea’s kitchen counter the week before.
“Someone’s gonna get hurt,” Delilah declared.
“That someone will probably be me. We both know she’s not sticking around.”
“I’m not so sure…” Delilah sounded unsure now, less like she was protecting the sisterhood and more like she had some sort of hunch.
“Not so sure it’s me who’ll get hurt or not so sure she’s leaving?” Dev didn’t know whether he’d followed right.
Her brow furrowed. “I don’t know, just…something’s wrong.”
Dev’s shaking head and frown were a question.
“And don’t even give me that look,” Delilah warned. “You know how much I like her.”
“Then what the hell is it?” Dev shot back.
“Whatever it is, I’m not sure either one of us is meant to know.”
“She’ll tell us whatever she decides to, in her own time,” Dev replied. “Considering the things she and I got to talking about last night, I’d say she’s pretty open.”
“All I’m saying is, be careful with her…” Delilah countered with more insistence. “She obviously came here to figure her own stuff out and you get, like, so intense when you set your sights on a woman. She’s not a project and she doesn’t need fixing. She just needs her own space and time. Why can’t you just—"
But Dev cut her right off.
“I like her.”
He said it simply and definitively and he hadn’t meant to interrupt. For all of Delilah’s good logic, his one good counterargument came down to that. And he had thought it through—especially all the parts that made he and Shea together seem like a good idea. She was intriguingly unusual and a total original. They’d had some funny attraction since day one. And the other part—the final part—the part where his body told him what to do even if his mind was crazy: he and Shea were stupid attracted to one another.
No matter how he sliced it in his mind, none of the bad outweighed the good. So Shea had secrets—every woman did. Best as he could tell from the night before, her mild evasiveness was backed up by good reason. And she hadn’t needed to tell him any of it—she’d done so voluntarily which was pretty strong evidence that she was doing her part to build trust. Hell, Dev had plenty of his own things he preferred to keep to himself.
“I’ve thought this through…” His eyes pleaded with Delilah to understand. Her mouth stayed shut. For all he knew, the secrets she’d found out through the sisterhood were the same ones he’d found out the night before. And he knew Delilah. If pursuing Shea put him in any real danger, blood would prevail and Delilah