Matched, page 15
But if Natalie was putting it all out there, Will probably needed to clear the air with Lindsey about it too. No more talking behind it. No more pretending it didn’t exist.
It was time to put the past to rest.
LINDSEY WASN’T unfamiliar with working on the weekends, but she usually stuck to one day or the other, generally no more than six or eight hours total.
By early Sunday afternoon, she’d racked up ten, and that was after spending yesterday morning at Bliss Bridal being fitted for a wedding gown she’d never wear for anything other than Nat’s promotional pictures for her new line of dresses. Lindsey spent Saturday afternoon with Dad and Noah at a crazy, jam-packed bouncy house place close to her office. So it had been natural—and a blessed, quiet, uncrowded relief—to swing in and do a few hours of paperwork instead of going straight home last night.
Today, she’d risen early so she could finish what she started at the office yesterday. But now, Lindsey was hungry, and she wanted to be home. Whether or not Will was there.
And she refused to think about which option she preferred.
She could’ve kicked him out—between the dog, the music and the memories, he shouldn’t have been her favorite houseguest. But between the dog, the music and the memories, he was inspiring ideas and feelings she shouldn’t have.
Her heart—and the smileys on her panties—squealed when her garage door lifted to reveal his big dark blue truck inside.
He wouldn’t be here forever. And she knew she shouldn’t let him be anything more than a friend.
But Will was her weakness.
He had been from the minute they met.
And neither her internal match-o-meter nor his big, public life—compared to her need for a simple, private life—could change that.
She softly opened the door into the house. Twangy music came from the living room.
She tossed her purse onto the counter, kicked off her mules, put them next to his cowboy boots and shrugged out of her coat, listening.
“…Soon I was tumbling into the snow, with my face all about to hit the ground…”
She couldn’t hear the song without thinking of nineteen-year-old Will, flashing that country boy grin, using that line—“Baby, that ain’t no way to break a man’s fall.”
There were other instruments, and his voice sounded different. Still Will, but not the same. He wasn’t playing the song on his guitar. It must’ve been on the radio.
In the living room, she found Wrigley on the floor at Will’s feet while he lounged on the couch, watching himself on the television.
Not the radio. His music video.
Shot at a ski resort.
Will flicked a glance at her, and she felt warm sunshine. “Five weeks at number one last fall,” he said conversationally.
The song played on. Lindsey’s heart tripped over itself. She hadn’t seen the video, and she couldn’t reconcile the man lounging on her couch with the man on the television, flashing a wink-wink every time he sang the word smile.
“Congratulations,” she murmured.
Will lifted a brow at her, and the sunshine she’d felt when she walked into the room morphed into a typhoon.
Congratulations? the brow said. That’s all you have to say? I wrote a song about your underwear and made millions off it, and all you want to say is Congratulations?
Tell him he’s an asshole, her brain said. What kind of creep writes a song about a woman’s underwear?
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, straight from her heart.
Not because he didn’t deserve an ass-kicking for writing a song about her underwear.
But because she needed to say it. She needed to know if he could honestly forgive her.
If she could forgive herself.
Not because they had a future. But because she needed to let go of the guilt from the past.
“That’s a right good start,” he said, his voice on the husky side.
Wrigley whimpered. He stood, shook and trotted to Lindsey’s side.
She didn’t know what else to say. Or how. Apologizing was a skill she’d voluntarily unlearned when she came home to Bliss as a divorce lawyer.
She’d had to, or she wouldn’t have survived.
“You know what’s always bothered me?” Will’s voice was raw, his eyes steady but seeping with old injury. “You knew. That whole week, you knew you’d leave. All that friend stuff was bullshit, and we both know it. Why’d you do it? Why’d you let me in when you knew you were fixin’ to just kick me out again?”
Why, indeed? Of all her regrets in life, hurting Will had always been the biggest. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. And I thought I had it under control. But I was a know-it-all nineteen-year-old who had alienated all her friends by telling them that my psychic powers said none of them were in good relationships. I was a freak who didn’t know how to be a friend. But you—you were funny and sweet and goodness personified. You made me feel like a person instead of a weirdo. And I hoped we could leave the week as friends, and that you’d never know how terrible I could be.”
He blinked twice, three times, before his mouth settled into a grim line. “Yeah, that didn’t work out.”
“No. It didn’t.”
“You could’ve told me. You could’ve trusted me.”
“We were a spring shower, Will. Warm and sweet and short. I’m sorry—I’m so sorry for how I ended things. I was then, and I am now. But it doesn’t change that we wouldn’t have made it.”
“And now? What are we now?”
He was warm breezes and roses and beach sunrises with Kimmie and Pepper and Nat and all those women he’d taken pictures with last Sunday night. And he was everything with Lindsey. The good and the bad. The sweet and the ugly. The hope and the doom.
Because she wanted him badly enough that she couldn’t judge?
Or because they would be the biggest train wreck of the century?
“Why are you here?” She hated the cracked punctuation of her voice. “What do you want from me? What are you looking for?”
“You make me hear the music.” His voice was as steady as her pulse. He hunched forward and thrust his fingers through his hair. “You do. Just you. Like nobody else ever has. I want—I need to know if there’s anything of the girl I fell for left under there.”
Her hands shook. The TV flashed images of the fireplace—the same fireplace in the same ski lodge with the same buffalo head over the fireplace.
He’d gone back. He’d walked where they’d met. And he’d let his people tape it and show it to the world, set to the tune of a song about her underwear.
He wanted to know if there was anything of the girl he’d known under there?
She gripped the bottom of her ivory cashmere sweater, and she lifted it over her head and tossed it aside. “Is that what you wanted to know?” she said, vulnerability—damn vulnerability—making her voice squeaky.
His gaze was so intense, so focused, so determined, she couldn’t have looked away if she’d wanted to.
“Could we make it now?” he said. “Are you supposed to inspire my songs forever?”
Lindsey’s heart ached so hard it almost stopped. Could they? Or couldn’t they? “I have a rule. Three weeks or three dates, whichever comes first. That’s it. I don’t do commitment. I don’t do long-term. I don’t do love. Those are my terms. You can take them, or you can leave.”
He stretched on the couch, his eyes making a slow perusal of her body. Her skin quivered. He may as well have been licking her body for all the yes, pleases coming from her smiley face panties.
And she couldn’t deny her own yes, please.
This was a bad, bad idea. It wouldn’t be a normal three dates or three weeks. He’d changed her world once before.
If he stayed, he would change her life again. Even knowing what she was offering, even knowing what she’d sacrifice when it was over, she offered it anyway.
Because she wanted him. Plain and simple, even though she knew it couldn’t last. She wanted Will Truitt. Again.
“Kissing part of this deal?” His voice—raw, throaty, unsteady—inspired a pull of longing between her thighs as much as the words themselves did.
“Yes.”
His eyes went dark. “Touching?”
“Yes.”
“Lights on or off?”
“Yes.”
His scorching gaze slid down her body once again. “Clothes on or off?”
She popped the button on her jeans and hooked her thumbs under the waistband.
He leaned forward, his breathing audibly quickening. Her core pulsed in time, hot and needy and ready.
This was a bad, bad idea. Even with boundaries.
Because he was the one man who could make her break her own rules. And she would still have to let him go.
She took her time, sliding her jeans off first one hip, then shifting to push them down the other, enough to show him that the smileys on her bra matched the smileys on her panties.
And that permanent smiley on her hip.
“Yes,” she said, her voice as unsteady as his. “Clothes on or off.”
He swiped a hand over his mouth, but she heard his murmured Christ almighty. He lifted his hooded eyes to hers. “Three weeks,” he said.
“Or three dates. Whichever—”
He stood. “Three weeks.” He stepped into her space, brushed his thumbs over her ribs, his hands on her back, his mouth moments from hers. “Three weeks. Say it.”
Three weeks.
Three weeks with Will. Her raw heart was working up a sweat. She licked her lips. She should outline option clauses, early termination terms, fidelity boundaries.
But this was Will. Her Will.
“Three weeks,” she whispered.
“Starting now.” He wasn’t looking at her eyes anymore. Nope, he was staring at her lips.
His head dipped close.
His jaw brushed hers.
A jolt of pleasure danced across her skin.
She remembered this. God, she remembered this.
She closed her eyes, inhaled his scent—cotton and soap and guitar—and took a leap of faith that she could put herself together again when they were over.
She touched the soft hair on his face. His hands drifted lower until they settled at her waist, his fingers squeezing into her rear, his body molding against hers as though he’d been born to fit her, and his lips touched hers.
Her breath caught, and she leaned into his kiss. Lips, tongue, teeth, everything. She kissed him, and he kissed her back, his mouth playing hers with the same skill as his fingers played his guitar.
Kissing Will made something inside her burst free, something innately her—a dance, a smile, a laugh. His touch, his lips, his very essence settled an irritation she’d felt so long she hadn’t realized it could be soothed, like a small part of her soul coming home.
A kiss this right shouldn’t have been so terrifying.
She had one hand at his neck, holding him right where she wanted him, the other exploring the hot skin beneath his T-shirt. Her breath came in short pleasured whimpers, and she desperately wanted to wrap her legs around his hips to soothe the ache growing between them. Will’s hands were decidedly less steady, his breathing more ragged, but his body still solid against hers.
A shiver raced through her body, and she felt it pass through him too. He eased out of the kiss, pulled his hands back. He pressed his lips to her forehead. “It’s a deal then,” he said, and he turned away, walking out of the living room while she stood there with her shirt off, her jeans half-down, and an aching pulse beneath her smileys.
“Whaa…?” she stuttered.
He’d been turned on too. She knew it. She’d felt it.
He was already halfway through the kitchen. “Gotta write a song,” he said.
“A song?”
Her only answer was the sound of guitar strings.
Chapter Twelve
WILL WASN’T SURE how long he was buried in the music, but when he looked up, his neck was stiff and his fingers sore, darkness had fallen, and a plate of food had magically appeared on the end table beside him.
Smooth?
Probably not.
But holy sweet Jesus. He’d liked Lindsey’s kisses when he was nineteen. Three weeks of them now might near kill him. He grinned to himself, a masochistic, you idiot kind of grin, but still a grin.
Three weeks.
He had a notion to mess with her on that idea. But he had a promise of three more weeks of inspiration, and he didn’t plan on wasting it or jacking it up by getting attached again.
Still, he probably needed to make nice with his muse.
He stood and stretched, felt blood coming back to his hind end. The food smelled good. Not down-home cookin’ good, but still good. There were definitely mashed potatoes and green beans on that plate beside him. The meat, he wasn’t sure about. Pork chops, maybe, or chicken. A light was on in the living room, so he grabbed the plate and the silverware Lindsey had left him, and he went in search of her.
Never much did like eating alone.
She was curled in the corner of the couch under her blanket again, reading something on her iPad. Wrigley was snoozing away on the floor. Will took a seat in the center of the couch, close enough that his leg sat against her toes, and settled the food on his lap. “Heard a rumor you can’t cook,” he said.
She didn’t look away from her reading. “You know rumors. They’re always true.”
She had him there. According to some of the tabloids, he had fourteen love children, two with aliens and one with the sister of Bigfoot.
He eyed his plate, half-suspecting he was about to get a mouthful of some super-hot-sauced dinner meat, maybe with a side of habanero peppers inside, but when he took a bite, all he tasted was gravy-slathered pork chop. Not bad. “You a secret chef, lawyer lady?” he said after he swallowed.
“I’m a woman of many secrets,” she said, still not looking up.
That, he believed.
He ate another three bites, watching her read. There were subtle dark smudges under her eyes, and she occasionally tucked her hair behind her ear as if she didn’t realize she was doing it. He caught himself reaching for Vera’s strap.
Funny. Lindsey had been his world for less than a week fifteen years ago. Barely any time at all. And he still didn’t know her. Not well, anyway. But sitting here with her was still cozy and homey and comfortable.
If he ignored her three weeks edict. He was good with having three weeks of inspiration.
Wasn’t sure how he felt about the expiration date. Or with her idea that she didn’t do love.
Was that his fault? Did some other jackass need a whoopin’?
Or was it because of what she could see?
“Good book?” he said into the silence between bites.
“Wikipedia.”
He grunted and went back to his plate, still watching her. Must’ve been interesting. She was so absorbed, he might as well have not been there. Not fair. Having his leg against her toes was making him remember her kiss. Hot and deep, right and wrong. That article must’ve been spectacular. Probably not something for a case. But what—
He choked on his mashed potatoes.
She lifted a brow and slid those deceptively innocent brown eyes in his direction. “Are you okay?”
He remembered the dry sense of humor. She controlled the spark of ornery better now than she had then. But he caught it. It was a glimmer, a shift in her gaze, a twitch at the corner of her mouth, but he saw it. He clapped himself on the chest, right where those potatoes were stuck behind his breastbone. “Great,” he managed.
She passed him a cup of water from behind her, and after watching him successfully swallow a gulp, she returned her attention to her tablet.
Turnabout for walking away from that kiss, if he knew anything about women.
The bigger problem, though, was in what he suspected she was reading. “My Web site’s more reliable,” he told her.
“And slanted to make you look like a saint,” she said. No shame there. Not a blush, not a bit of hesitation. “But I assume that’s intentional.”
Will set his dinner aside and put his arm over the back of the sofa, leaning closer to her, trapping her toes under his leg. She kept her focus on her iPad, but he saw the flutter of her pulse in her neck.
Girl wasn’t unaffected.
He wasn’t either. She inspired more than his songs.
She was pretty. Intriguing. And as far as he could tell, completely indifferent to his being Billy Brenton now. “Not quite fair, my life being an open book on the Internet, and yours being all private. Couldn’t even find a Facebook page for you.”
She flipped a cover over her tablet and set it aside, then looked at him, big pools of milk chocolate that could’ve either been inviting him in or warning him to stay out.
He shifted closer to her. “Still planning on being president one day?”
“As it turns out, public speaking is a talent I neither currently possess nor have any hopes of mastering.” Her toes burrowed under his leg, tickling and teasing his hamstrings, but her gaze dropped and the softest blush washed over her cheeks. “The signs were there from my first Miss Flower Girl pageant, but after the incident in Colorado—well. Denial is hard to continue with that many witnesses. I still hate microphones. I almost hyperventilated during my toast at Nat’s wedding.”
Wrigley pushed his whole body to standing so he could put his head in Lindsey’s lap. She smiled at him and scratched behind his ears, and dang if that dog didn’t smile back at her.
And dang if Will wasn’t jealous of the dog. Should’ve been Will telling her it was okay.
He remembered the incident in Colorado well. He remembered the lights of the stage, remembered the crowd aawing when he pulled his girl up there with him, remembered her panicked smile while he told the whole tavern he loved her. He remembered her blurting into the microphone that she didn’t love him. That she couldn’t love him. That her mystical powers said he was all wrong for her. He remembered his heart breaking. He’d heard it. Heard it crack, felt it break into chunks. But it didn’t feel like it had happened to him anymore.
