she said as he pulled the truck out onto the main highway.
“Well, good for him. I would expect nothing different. In fact, if he didn’t I’d have to have a serious talking-to with him. You know, kind of like an older brother thing.”
“You’re not his brother,” she pointed out.
“No,” Luke said. “But I’m older. Full of wisdom.”
“Ancient,” she said drily.
He took his eyes off the road for a moment, to look at that imperious little profile of hers. Her cheeks were still pink.
He heard a phone notification, and saw Olivia lift her phone up and text quickly.
“Who’s that?”
“Do I owe you an explanation for all of my actions now?” she asked, her tone snippy.
“I’m making conversation, Liv,” he said. “You know, since you’re in my truck and making conversation with someone else instead of with me.”
“It’s my mother,” she said.
“Checking in on you?”
“Yes. She does that. She just wants to know what I’m up to.”
“And what did you tell her?” He was genuinely curious how she was going to spin this story to her parents. He was also fascinated by the fact that her mother checked in.
He’d been an orphan for all intents and purposes by the time he was sixteen, and before that, he had done a lot of the caregiving in his household. His only other real experience with a parent-type relationship was with Quinn Dodge, and while Quinn was definitely an involved father, he didn’t hover.
“I told her I was going out with a friend,” she said.
“That feels like an upgrade,” he said. “Though, you might have told her you had a date.”
“No,” she said, “I mightn’t have. Because then she would want details, and she would want to know what time I was coming home, and she would want to make sure that I didn’t have anything put in my drink.”
He laughed. “A little overprotective?”
“Maybe. But we are close. She just wants to know what’s going on in my life.” He could tell that wasn’t the whole story, but he could also tell that she wasn’t going to give him much more right now. If she’d wanted to, she would have just come out and told him.
And he didn’t do female excavation. He liked easy conversation; he didn’t like to dig. Because that meant getting down to the bits of people they didn’t want to share, which meant that they might want him to do the same in turn. He preferred stripping off layers of clothes to any other kind of stripping off of layers, thank you very much.
And since Olivia wasn’t going to be stripping off any clothes for him—and he wouldn’t ask her to anyway—there wasn’t any point in courting any other type of stripping.
“Well, that’s nice.” Except to him it sounded stifling more than it sounded nice.
“It is. I have great parents. I’m lucky.” Her tone sounded distracted. Distant.
“Sure,” he said.
“You’re very difficult,” she said.
“Yes,” he remarked, making his tone as contrite as possible. “It’s been said. Frequently. Mostly by you.”
She sniffed loudly, and he imagined that there was a very haughty face accompanying that sniff. “It’s just... As far as I can tell you aren’t accountable to anyone or anything. I don’t understand that. I have my parents... I have goals... I have... Bennett.”
“Technically,” Luke pointed out, feeling like an ass even as he said it, “you don’t have Bennett at the moment.”
“You’re mean,” she said.
“Am I wrong?”
“No. But... I feel like a gentleman wouldn’t say that. And you’re so into pointing out what a gentleman does.”
“That’s the trouble,” he said. “I’m playing the part of a gentleman. But don’t for one second confuse me with an actual gentleman.”
At that exact moment, they drove down onto the town’s main street, and Luke spotted an open parking space against the curb across from the Gold Valley Saloon.
He put the truck in Park, then looked at Olivia’s resolute profile. “Ready?”
“Now who’s impatient,” she said, hands pinned firmly to the center of her lap, her eyes fixed straight ahead.
“Not impatient,” he said. Except he felt something. A kind of restlessness rolling through him that left him feeling edgy. And he didn’t do edgy.
He liked irritating Olivia—it was one of his great joys in life. He didn’t so much like it when she managed to poke her own little stick back at him and make contact.
He got out of the truck, and he noticed that she stayed put. Waiting for him to open the door. In spite of himself, his lips curved up into a smile.
He opened it for her, then offered her his hand, which this time she took. The skin-to-skin contact hit him like a knockout punch. She was soft. So damn soft. That didn’t shock him; he had expected her to be soft. What shocked him was the fact that such innocuous contact had him hot and hard in seconds. And maybe that was the reason, in and of itself. The fact that he hadn’t been expecting the impact. Maybe that was why it landed with such accuracy, with such force.
Whatever it was, he’d felt less pleasure from a hand wrapped around more intimate parts of him than from her delicate fingers wrapped around his own.
“Let’s go,” he said, his voice gruffer than he intended. But dammit, he was affected. He wasn’t used to being affected. He was used to doing the affecting. He was used to being the one causing a reaction, not contending with one. Particularly one he didn’t want.
He didn’t have a lot of practice in restraint. Life was pretty easy for him. Everything he had he’d worked for honestly. Everything except that money in the bank from the insurance settlement. And that was why it still sat there, because it occupied a place that was uncomfortable for him. A place he didn’t know what to do with.
He didn’t like things like that. He liked his life simple.
He wanted something, he worked for it. He wanted a woman, he slept with her. He wanted to be done with a woman, he cut things off.
He didn’t do longing. He didn’t do unrequited lust and unquenched desire. He didn’t want things he couldn’t have. Hell, usually he didn’t even want things he had to wait for.
But there was money he’d received from a loss, from a moment in time he resented, and if he did nothing with it, it would be worse than benefiting from it.
And there was Olivia Logan. About to make him lose his
