before he knew he was talking. Being as he had no idea what was coming out next, he shut his mouth.
She slipped in beside him, her body curling around his without hesitation. The warm weight of her breasts pressed against his chest. He wrapped an arm around her and pulled her even closer, until he could feel her heartbeat.
“Josey,” he said again as he kissed the top of her head.
A few moments passed, and he started to drift. So when she said, “Ben,” it jolted him back awake.
“Yeah?”
“Why did you buy all those things for the school?”
The way she said it—quiet, serious and not sleepy—forced his brain to click back on. He got the feeling that, if he wasn’t careful, he’d walk right into a trap.
He must have taken too long, because she went on, “Was it just to impress me…”
Hell, yeah, he’d wanted to impress her. He wanted to turn her on, sweep her off her feet and make her think he was the best she’d ever had. Any man who didn’t put that sort of effort into impressing her wasn’t worth a damn in his book.
Her heartbeat had picked up a little speed as her fingers clutched at his chest. “You didn’t have to spend all that money just to get to tonight. I would have…anyway. I wanted to.”
If he lived to be a hundred and forty, he would never figure out women, because she was making it sound like he’d bought her.
“That’s not why.”
His words came out a little more pissed than he intended, and she shrank away from him.
Aw, screw it.
He lifted her off the bed. She didn’t weigh very much—it was easy to set her on his chest, belly-to-belly, full-body contact. “You want to know why I told you I wouldn’t give you any money and then bought you stuff.”
Maybe he’d scared her too much, because she didn’t answer. She just nodded. At least she didn’t scramble down off him. Despite his exhaustion and confusion, she felt good on top of him.
Why. A damn fine question. When he put it like that—why had he spent so much of his hard-earned money? He could say it was just to impress her—it wouldn’t be a total lie—but it wasn’t the whole truth.
He closed his eyes again, and the sight of Josey’s face when he’d brought all that stuff swam before him. But that wasn’t the only thing there. He saw the way Don Two Eagles’s contempt became begrudging respect, how those kids went from terror to excitement—how they’d all looked at him and seen someone important. Someone who mattered.
“My old man is ashamed of me.” The bitterness of the words cut at his mouth.
“What?” She managed to sound indignant. He took that as a compliment. “You run a company and have a beautiful home and—”
“I’m not the son he’s proud of on a Friday night. I’m a bean-counter brainiac. I’m not anything he wanted me to be.”
In the dark, she rested her chin on his chest and looked at him. “But the band—”
“The only time he ever heard me play was the night Bobby sang lead. He could care less about me because I’m not him like Billy is and I’m not Mom like Bobby is. I can’t be what he thinks I should be.” Lord only knew how much time he’d wasted trying.
“But—”
“Doesn’t matter.” Which was the truth. Here, with her welcoming body covering his, Dad mattered less than he ever had. “And everyone else? They think I’m an arrogant asshole with a heart of stone who only thinks about the bottom line.”
She made a little noise of disbelief, but those were the unvarnished facts. People always expected him to be someone else—dangerous biker, drummer, creative welder, smooth-talker—but he wasn’t any of those things. He liked the simplicity of numbers. He lived in an old factory with artists who cleaned it for him. He played in a band. He didn’t make promises he didn’t intend to keep, and he always kept the few he did make.
He was holding a beautiful woman. And she was holding him back.
“So why did you get all that stuff?”
She didn’t sound spooked by the question this time, which meant he wasn’t as spooked to answer it.
“I guess I wanted to prove to someone that I wasn’t any of those things. I wanted to prove it to you.”
Funny, that was the truth. He wouldn’t have thought about it like that if she hadn’t pushed him—but wasn’t that one of the things that