“Excuse me? Who has her mind in the gutter now? I was absolutely thinking about cinnamon Jolly Ranchers.” More accurately, I was thinking about how spicy-sweet Tori’s mouth is. And how much I’d like to kiss her again. Not to mention how good her lips would feel wrapped around my cock as she sucked me down her throat. But considering the way she tastes, cinnamon Jolly Ranchers aren’t actually that far off the mark. And a safer bet right now than telling her just how much I’d like her to suck on me for a while.
Of course, Tori’s not buying it. In fact, she looks at me so suspiciously that I can’t help wondering if my true thoughts are actually plastered on my forehead. She seems to be weighing her words carefully and I brace myself for a zinger, but in the end all she says is, “I’m a green apple girl myself.”
“Oh yeah?” I answer, tilting my head to study her appraisingly. It seems like an innocuous answer, but the look in her eyes tells me there’s more to it than she’s letting on. Or that I can figure out.
Normally that would grate on me—I’m the kind of guy who spends his life figuring things out, after all. Problems, puzzles, enigmas are pretty much my thing. The fact that Tori is definitely the latter—and that I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on who she is or how she thinks—should make me crazy. Instead it just intrigues me. Makes me want to dig deeper even as I pore over every new thing I learn about her.
“Now, that surprises me.”
“Good,” she says with a grin.
“Good?”
“Yeah, good.” She cocks a challenging brow my way. “All girls need a few surprises up their sleeves, don’t you think?”
“What I think is that you’ve got more than a few.” And suddenly I’m more interested than I want to be in unraveling as many as I can.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But she’s smiling as she fills up a pot with water and sets it on the stove to boil. “I’m almost an open book.”
I snort. “Yeah, one that’s written in code maybe.”
She laughs, then, her brown eyes sparkling in a way I’ve rarely seen. It’s a good look, one I can’t help but drink in—at least until she turns back to the center island and begins chopping the asparagus into one-inch pieces.
“I really can do more than wash tomatoes,” I tell her as I put the now clean fruit on the counter. “I may not be the best cook, but I can chop with the best of them.”
“Fine,” she says with a long-suffering sigh. “If you have to do something, you can set the table and open a bottle of wine that will go with a light summer pasta.” She points to the patio. “Out there.”
“In other words, I should just stay the hell out of your kitchen while you’re cooking.”
“You said it, not me.”
“Oh, I think you said it loud and clear.”
She sticks her tongue out at me as she moves from the asparagus to the broccolini. “And who says men don’t get subtext?”
“Someone who’s never met a man trying to keep up with you,” I tell her as I grab plates from the cabinet.“
For long seconds, she doesn’t say anything. But then, just as I’ve moved to pull silverware from the drawer, she asks, “Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Trying to keep up with me?”
“Absolutely. If by trying to keep up with you, you mean running half a mile behind while trying desperately to keep you in sight.”
She laughs, bright and bubbly, then shoos me out of the kitchen. I do as she asks, but as I go I can’t help wondering if she gets that I meant exactly what I said.
Chapter 11
Tori
Miles is surprisingly good company.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised—after all, because of Chloe, we’ve hung out together dozens of times in the last year—but somehow I still am. I guess I’ve been too busy hating the idea of him to pay attention to the fact that I don’t really hate him.
Then again, it’s hard to hate a guy who’s gone out of his way to help me. And who, I’m learning, is working his ass off to make it up to Chloe for his past mistakes. I may not like the fact that he was so self-absorbed, he never clued in to what their parents made her sacrifice to get him the money he needed to make his first patent a reality. But I am beginning to realize he really didn’t know.
And as he stands up to clear the dishes—“You cooked, I’ll clean”—I realize I’m not going to be able to go back to how I felt about him before this whole debacle unfolded. More, I don’t want to. After all, it’s hard to hate a guy when he already hates himself.