Taking the Leap (River Rain 3)

A man would have a lot more patience with Peri. Rix knew that from experience.

It didn’t take her long to pay, scuttle out of her position and lope to Rix with her hair swaying, coffee in hand.

Her manner was all Peri, confident that she was all she was. Tall, gorgeous, great figure, head-turning, attention-grabbing just from walking into a room…or across the tarmac at a coffee place.

He crossed his arms on his chest.

It wasn’t intentional, but it was a good move, her eyes dropped there as she stopped a few feet away from him, and he saw her tanned cheeks get pink.

Score one for Rix, because she dug his height, she also dug his build, including his chest, which was a lot more developed now since he had to use it so much.

“Yo, Peri,” he greeted.

Her gaze lifted to his face.

“Hey,” she breathed.

He felt that in his dick, like he always did when she talked like that.

Then something bizarre happened.

In his head, he heard Alex saying Yeah, all husky and hot, and he felt that in his dick and his balls.

What was that?

“Listen, I…” Peri regained his attention. When she got it, he noted she seemed like she was struggling. She started again. “How’re you doing?”

Uh…

What?

“How am I doing?” he asked.

“Yeah, things going good for you?”

Was she serious?

He hadn’t stood face to face with her in two years. And the last time he was face to face with her, he wasn’t standing. He was lying in their fucking bed, and she was ripping his heart out in order to take a shit on it.

And she waylays him at a coffee place to ask how he’s doing?

“I’m on my way to work, that’s how I’m doing. I’m also wondering why I had to pull over at Scooter’s to tell you face to face how I’m doing. If you’re curious, you got my number, you could text.”

She winced like he’d been an asshole or something, when he hadn’t been altogether friendly, but he hadn’t been an asshole, then she stated, “I deserved that.”

All right.

What?

“You deserved what?”

“You never used to talk to me like that.”

“Talk to you like what?”

“Like you don’t have time for me.”

For shit’s sake.

“Peri, no disrespect, but right now I actually don’t have time for you seeing as, like I said, I’m on my way to work.”

“We need to talk,” she asserted.

They did?

“About what?” he inquired suspiciously.

“About us.”

There it was.

The answer to his earlier question.

She was not serious.

This assertion came out of nowhere.

And with what she’d made of them, and the time that had elapsed in between, which was significant, he knew one thing.

It would go nowhere.

Rix took a calming breath before he reminded her, “Peri, there is no us.”

“C’mon, honey, there’ll always be an us,” she said quietly.

Nope.

She was not serious.

And with her standing there, five feet away, her coming there in her Jeep, him in his truck, when they used to wake up beside each other and go to work together if their schedules synced, paying separate for coffee, when no way he’d let her pay for shit, a stark reminder of what became of them, all of this because of her decisions and actions, he was losing his hold on calm.

To move them along, he shared more history, and since it would no way adhere to what he was saying anyway, he didn’t sugarcoat it.

“The memory is burned on my brain, about two days after I got home from the hospital, you spotting me as I transferred from chair to our bed, then you sitting down beside me in that bed and saying we weren’t going to work. I also remember you relating to me how decent of a person you were, seeing that, even though I no longer had a job, not to mention, I had no freaking clue what I was going to end up doing to make a living since I’d been a firefighter since I was nineteen, and incidentally, I had no legs…”

She winced again.

He powered through it.

“…you were okay that you took the financial hit of canceling the reception place, the cake and the flowers. Though I ate it because I paid for the invites and the save the dates, which, and not only because we’d sent them, couldn’t be returned. I was just lucky it was my friends who were going to be our photographer, caterer and DJ, considering the day I was supposed to marry you, I was in a hospital bed, and they were more worried about that than getting paid.”

She studiously kept hold on his gaze, not looking down to his legs, when she stated, “That was so close to when it all happened, Rix. You have to understand. I was still adjusting.”

Jesus, he couldn’t believe his ears.

“You were adjusting?”

“It happened to us both,” she shot back.

Okay.

He tried.

But now, calm was a memory.