A Five-Minute Life - Page 115
He’s so polite and chivalrous. I wonder if his grandpa Jack taught him how to treat women.
Jim got an earful from my sister for a good minute, watching the road as he listened.
“It’s not up to me, Ms. Hughes,” he said, finally. “It’s up to Thea.”
“Amen,” I muttered.
“We won’t,” Jimmy said into the phone. “I promise.”
He listened for another ten seconds then pulled the phone away. “I think she hung up on me.”
“Typical. What did you promise her?”
“That we wouldn’t vanish.”
“Fine, but I’m not going to tell her where we’re staying in New York. Let her try to find us. What else did she say?”
“Various threats about what she’d do to me if anything happened to you. Death. Dismemberment. Castration.”
“She watches Game of Thrones too.”
We shared a smile, but the unease of Delia’s threats settled into my gut like carsickness, until he indicated a sign for a roadside diner a few miles outside of Baltimore. Then I was ravenous for a burger and fries and a chocolate milkshake.
“This good?”
“Works for me.”
Jimmy took the exit and parked the truck in the diner lot. He started to get out, but I stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Delia can’t really have you arrested, can she?”
“Don’t know. Maybe if you were incapacitated?”
“And I’m not. I can speak for myself if she tries something. But I don’t want to get you in trouble. You already lost your job for me.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Why risk it?”
Is it because you’re as crazy about me as I am about you?
Jimmy shrugged slightly, glanced down at my fingers on his skin. “You wanted this. You deserve it. I wanted to make it happen.”
I lowered my gaze, traced a scar on his knuckle with my fingertip. “What else do you want, Jimmy?”
His dark eyes met mine and he swallowed hard. I felt the need in him under my hand. I saw it burning in his eyes. I heard it in the words he’d just swallowed down, and my heart pounded, waiting.
“I want to eat,” he said finally. “I’m starved.”
He pulled from my touch and climbed out of the truck.
“Ouch,” I said to the empty cab.
Maybe I was all wrong about Jimmy. Maybe he didn’t feel for me what I felt for him. Maybe he truly only wanted to do this for me, like some kind of field trip.
After he kissed me the way he did? I thought, going back to that beautiful morning. Impossible.
But I was suddenly too afraid to push it. Like waiting for biopsy results—maybe just better to live in blissful ignorance. Except it wasn’t blissful. It was torture.
I’ll just have do things the old-fashioned way and seduce him.
Source: readsnovelonline.net