She should have begged him to stay. That and a body blow would have been less painful than the plaintive but resigned note in Carly’s voice. She was going to let him go. Mike thought he had been prepared.
He had been wrong. “Sit down.” Pausing to flick on a lamp, he prodded her toward the living room couch.
He dropped onto the soft cushion and patted the empty space next to him. She sat. But her silence unnerved him more than any hysterical scene.
“Tell me about the sections of your book,” he said.
“What?” Startled, she looked up at him.
He cupped her chin in his hand and stared into her eyes. “We have tonight.”
“And you want to spend it talking about my book?” She blinked and a lone teardrop leaked down her cheek. He caught it with his thumb, pausing to lick the salt off his finger.
“I want to spend it with you. In case you don’t realize it, sex isn’t the only thing between us.” He couldn’t leave letting her believe he cared only for the good time they’d had in bed. Given her inherent fear, the possibility shook him to the core. So he would spend what little time they had left condensing a few more weeks of intimate discussion into one night.
He drew a deep breath. “I care about you. All of you.”
“You do?”
He slanted her a look meant to chastise.
“Sorry,” she murmured.
“You should be.” He let his hand come to rest on her shoulder. “Why do you keep doubting me?”
She flicked her bangs out of her eyes. A gesture that had become second nature to her and so familiar to Mike that it caused a warmth in the region of his heart... because she used it whenever he touched hers.
“I can’t remember the last person who cared enough about me to ask something so... trivial.”
“Since when is your career trivial?”
She shook her head. “To me it’s not. But to other people...” Her shoulders lifted and fell.
“Hey.”
Raising her long lashes, she looked at him with wide eyes.
“Don’t I deserve a label a little more personal than other people?”
“Yeah, I guess you do.” She laughed, a light-hearted sound that despite the tense and somber circumstances sounded natural, not forced. A sound Mike knew he would carry with him wherever he went.
“Progress.” Releasing an exaggerated groan, he propped his feet up on the couch, prompting her to shift and join him laying down or be dislodged.
“So. How do you go about solving the problems of the American teenager?”
Carly leaned her head against his chest and snuggled closer so she wouldn’t topple onto the floor. Enjoying his warmth and needing his strength had nothing to do with her actions. “Name your biggest problem as a teen,” she said.
“Family,” he said without hesitation.
Thinking about his parents’ deaths and his disinterested aunt and uncle, she could only imagine the depth of the dysfunction he’d lived. “And after family?” she asked.
“Sex.”
She nudged him in the side with her elbow.
He groaned. “Direct hit,” he muttered. “I meant girls.”
“Relationships,” she clarified. “And from a teenage girls’ perspective, it was probably friends and then relationships,” she said in a purely authoritative tone.