deep down inside you’re actually a nice, decent human being?”
His heart swelled at her words—but it only reminded him of another body part that tended to swell around her. Not sure how much more hero worship he could take, he purposely lightened the mood.
He reached over and chucked her gently on the chin. “That’s where you’re wrong, Jess. Deep down inside, I’m just like I am on the outside.”
She stiffened. “I don’t believe you. You wanted people to think you’re despicable, but you weren’t.”
“Despicable?” He laughed. “Honey, villains with big mustaches in old silent movies are despicable.”
The irritation flashed in her eyes again but quickly disappeared. However, it wasn’t as easy to hide the blush his teasing had brought to her cheeks. She pressed her lips into a thin line. “Okay. So not despicable.”
Sensing he was close to having her exactly where he wanted her, he pressed his advantage. “No. Not despicable.” And because he just couldn’t resist touching her, he reached for her hand. Instead of taking it in his, he flipped it over, exposing her palm to his touch. “I’m much worse than despicable. You know what I was thinking about the whole way home?” She shook her head. “I was thinking about how I wanted to kiss you.”
“But—”
He didn’t let her finish. “There you were thinking I was some kind of a hero and all I could think about was how to get in your pants.” He didn’t look at her, didn’t take his eyes away from her palm, which he couldn’t seem to stop touching. It was so incredibly soft and warm under his fingertips. “I would have nailed you in a minute if you’d given me the chance.”
She pulled her hand away. “I don’t believe you.”
This time he couldn’t stop himself from meeting her gaze. He studied her face, but for once found it almost impossible to read her expression.
“As you pointed out,” she said. “There I was, thinking you were a hero. If all you’d wanted was to—”
When she hesitated, he supplied the words for her. “Nail you.”
She nodded. “If that was really what you wanted from me, you could have had it then.”
At her near-whispered words, blood surged through his groin, nearly destroying the last of his control. But her calm and steady gaze assured him of her seriousness. He laughed ruefully. “It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know that then.”
Now she was the one to laugh, clearly embarrassed. “And here all this time, I assumed you did know and just weren’t interested.” He shot her a questioning look and she shrugged sheepishly. “I looked for you all that next week at school, but every time I saw you, you were with friends. Or that girlfriend of yours. What was her name?”
Alex had to search his memory. Funny, he’d dated “that girlfriend of his” for months, but he could barely remember her name, let alone picture her. Yet he still remembered the expression on Jessica’s face when she’d put her hand into his. And the color of the shirt she’d been wearing. And the way she’d smelled. And—
“Sandra,” he finally supplied.
“Right. Sandra. Every time I saw you that week, you were with her. At first, I thought you were avoiding me on purpose.”
“I was. It wouldn’t have been in either of our best interests if people thought there was something going on between us.”
He’d known even then how impossible a relationship with her would be. Even a friendship would have caused problems. She was the a straight-A student and the daughter of the county judge. He was the son of a migrant farm worker, already a grade behind in school, in and out of more trouble than she could imagine, his police record already burgeoning. None of that had kept him from wanting her, but it had damn well kept him from acting on it.
He’d avoided her so effectively that she’d eventually resorted to slipping a note in his locker. Three simple lines thanking him for coming to her rescue, in neat, cursive writing on pale pink paper.
“I thought that you knew I’d developed a crush on you and were trying to discourage me,” she said now.
“I was.”
Her gaze darted to his, her eyes a vivid blue that he seemed to have no defenses against. “Then why did you write me back?”
Because he’d just plain been unable to resist.
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
His response, slipped through the vent of her locker during fifth period, had started a flurry of notes. She wrote him every day, often more than once, about things both wonderful and absurdly out of the realm of his experience—a low score on a chemistry exam, the shoes her mother had had dyed to match for some party dress, the fight she’d had with her parents over whether or not she’d go to tennis camp over the summer.
He’d written her less often, but with almost unbearable attention to detail. He’d penned his notes to her in the library, hunched over the dictionary, carefully checking his spelling, scouring the thesaurus for words he thought would make him look smart. Words like “supposition” and “eradicate.”
Those three weeks that they’d exchanged notes had been some of the happiest of his young life. Then one day he’d received a note from her asking if he wanted to take her to the prom.
He’d known he couldn’t do it, but God how he’d wanted to. And he hadn’t had the heart to say no. So he’d just stopped writing to her.
“I know you thought I was just some annoying kid,” she said now. “But I loved getting those notes from you. I’d pretend, just for a little while, that I was your girlfriend, instead of Sandra.” She paused for a heartbeat, lost in some long-ago memory. “It was like you couldn’t keep your hands off her. Did you know, I even saw you kissing her once?”
He did know. He remembered the moment vividly. He’d been avoiding Jessica all week, but she hadn’t taken the hint when he’d stopped answering her notes. Every time he’d turned around, there she’d be. His patience and his willpower had started to wear thin. She hadn’t ever caught him alone, but he’d been sure she eventually would. He’d been sure she’d look up at him with those impossibly blue eyes and that when she did he wouldn’t be able to resist doing something incredibly stupid, like kiss her.
So he’d done something he was sure would scare her off. He’d kissed Sandra in front of her. Not an innocent little peck on the mouth, either, but a full-bodied, open-mouthed, I-can’t-wait-to-get-your-body-naked kiss.
“I’d never seen anyone kiss like that,” Jessica admitted with a little laugh. “Not in real life anyway. That kiss…it was like something out of movie. And I remember thinking, ‘So that’s passion.’ I’d never been kissed like that.” She laughed nervously, the pink returning to her cheeks. “I still haven’t.”
“Jess—”
Her hands were clasped tightly together and she was staring pointedly down at them. “All my life and I’ve never been kissed like that. Never felt that kind of passion. Or had anyone feel that kind of passion about me.”
The
