Perfect Kiss (17 page)

Levi made his way across the dining room to lock the front door after the last customer had left. When he turned back around, Shelby was yawning as she rubbed the back of her neck before she placed her receipts and cash into the daily envelope.

“Hey, I’ve got all of this. Why don’t you call it a night?” As much as he looked forward to this time of the day—when they’d clean up together and talk about the crazy customers they’d had or weird stories they’d heard throughout the day—he wanted her to get rest more.

If someone would have told Levi in his twenties that just shooting the shit with a woman that he was intensely attracted to would be something he would actually
look forward
to, he would have told them that they must have the wrong guy. His relationships with women had always been based firmly in the physical category.

Since moving to Hope Falls, he had made friends with a few members of the opposite sex, but none that he was actually interested in. It’s not like he didn’t find Amanda, Nikki, Karina, or Amy attractive, he did. But, taking anything further than that had never even crossed his mind. Not even when they were single.

“Nah, that’s okay. I’m fine. I don’t mind.” Shelby waved her hand in dismissal, and when she looked up at him, he noticed the dark circles under her eyes.

“Shelby, you’ve done more than enough today. Why don’t you go get some rest?” Levi didn’t want to insist and piss her off even more, but he was serious about her needing sleep.

Before his eyes, Shelby transformed from looking worn out and exhausted to alert and formidable. Squaring her shoulders, she pursed her lips, and it became clear that he didn’t even have to
insist
to irritate her. She appeared to be good and pissed off already.

“I said I’m fine.” Her tone suggested that she was done with this conversation.

“Yeah—fine and stubborn.” Levi was half teasing and half serious as he dropped the subject, because come on. He wasn’t an idiot.

So he moved on to plan B, which consisted of working double time to get all the closing duties done, since it looked like she had planted her feet and wasn’t budging about calling it a night. He began lifting the chairs in the dining area up and set them on the tables so he could sweep.

After he balanced the last chair on the tabletop, he went to get the broom and was halted mid stride when he saw that Shelby was standing stock-still, just staring at him. She didn’t look mad, exactly. Not really upset or all that happy. It wasn’t a blank stare, either. There were all kinds of emotions behind her gaze; Levi couldn’t quite put his finger on how to read her expression though.

“What?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“You said that I was stubborn.” It was a simple statement, not an accusation.

“Yeah, I did.” He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. He knew how he’d intended it, but for the life of him, he couldn’t read how she had. Tilting his head to the side, he tried to address the situation. “You’ve had to have heard that before. I can’t be the first person to tell you that.”

“No, you’re not.” A small smile—that, for some reason, broke Levi’s heart in half—tugged at her lips as she shook her head back and forth. He wasn’t standing all that close to her, but unless his eyes were playing tricks on him there were tears pooling in her bottom lid. With a sniff, she explained, “People used to tell me that all the time. But you’re the first person to say it in a long time.”

Levi had always understood that men and women were different. Yep, men were from Mars, women were from Venus—he was on board with all of that. Some guys spent their lives trying to comprehend the multilayered female psyche. As far as Levi was concerned, he would rather try to crack the
Da Vinci Code.
He figured he’d at least have a shot at that. Mainly because he’d viewed it as totally and completely impossible, he’d never attempted to try and figure out the fairer sex. The more time he spent with Shelby, the more he found himself doing just that. Not the female population on the whole, just one member of the X chromosome community.

He wanted to know what Shelby was thinking. Why she did the things she did. Why she said the things she said. He wanted to know what made her tick. He wanted to know
everything
about her.

Since there was no way he’d be able to glean any of that information via osmosis, he figured he better try a more direct approach. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“A good thing.” She nodded as she shakily sucked in a breath. “A very good thing.”

“Oh, good.” Levi searched Shelby’s beautiful face. He knew she wasn’t lying. So, if it was a good thing, he couldn’t figure out why she was so affected by it. He decided to cover his bases. Just in case. “Well, if I upset you, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anyth—”

“You didn’t,” she said, cutting him off lifting her hand. Then, taking a deep breath, she closed the distance between them, moving down the length of the bar until she was standing directly in front of him, with only the bar separating them.

She focused her eyes on him and he saw there was a war battling behind her gorgeous, aqua-colored eyes. He wished he could help her win the battle—hell, at this point he’d settle for even knowing what the battle was.

With more patience than he even knew he possessed, he remained quiet, allowing her the time she needed to gather her thoughts or build up courage, or just time to figure out whatever was going on in that beautiful head of hers.

“You were right,” she said after what felt like forever, with a finality he wasn’t sure how to interpret.

The air between them was so tense and thick that it could be cut with a knife, and he didn’t like it. He wanted her to share with him. Tell him anything and everything. But not like this. He wanted her to be comfortable.

“I was, huh? I like where this is going. I’m afraid my rightness happens a lot though, so you’re going to have to be more specific. What exactly was I right about?”

That was all it took for the tension to break. Shelby chuckled and rolled her eyes. Her shoulders relaxed, and her face no longer looked like she’d been sucking on lemons.

“This afternoon, you were right that I didn’t just show up in Hope Falls for no reason. I left because…I was in a…bad situation. It was…scary.”

Levi tried his best not to broadcast in high definition any of the anger he was feeling. Not on his face. Not in his eyes. And definitely not in his body language. Deliberately, he relaxed his muscles, which had all seized up the second she’d said the words “bad situation” and “scary.”

His limited knowledge of women aside, he knew instinctively that if he made a wrong move, she would retreat back inside her protective turtle shell, and he didn’t know when she would poke her head out again. So, keeping his face as neutral as possible, he waited for her to continue. It was painfully hard, but he waited.

Chapter 15

‡

S
wallowing over the lump that had developed in her throat in the last thirty seconds, Shelby tried to silence the voices in her head that were screaming for her to shut up. Telling her not to say anymore. Telling her that no one could know what had happened.

When Levi had called her stubborn, something inside her popped like a patient’s back at a chiropractor. Something clicked in her disjointed brain. A piece of the puzzle that created the symbolic picture of
her
had snapped into place. She had instantly known that it had happened, but she had no idea of exactly how to process the feeling. It was profound. It was freeing. It was surreal.

Shelby had always believed that words were powerful. She cosigned on the widespread philosophy that they held the power of life and death. But she’d never quite felt the instantaneous effect of them before that moment.

That one sentence, one word, had been the equivalent of a verbal defibrillator. Levi had jolted her awake. Yeah. The best way to describe the past year was to say that she’d been sleepwalking through her life, and, most of the time, it wasn’t a pleasant dream. It was a nightmare. As hard as she’d tried to wake herself up, to claw her way back to being fully conscious and alert, she hadn’t been able to do it.

For months, she’d held on to the hope that she’d be able to find her way out of the foggy existence she’d been living in. She’d tried so many things to break through the clouds. Everything from pretending she was her old self, the ol’ fake-it-till-you-make-it method, to manning a boat built for one traveling up the River of Denial. If she didn’t address the fact that anything bad had happened, then, like a tree that fell in the forest, did anyone hear it? Nothing had worked.

Sure, she’d made some progress, but she’d still felt like a foreigner in her own body. Like a visitor in her own mind.

There wasn’t an exact moment she could pinpoint that she’d lost herself. It had been more like a gradual fading of identity. As if she’d slipped farther and farther down the rabbit hole every day. So she’d figured that the only way to get back to the real world was to go step by baby step.

So imagine her surprise when a passing observation from Levi ended up being the golden ticket into the chocolate factory of her subconscious. It was hard to put into words what she was feeling in this moment. The closest thing she could compare it to was that she’d been wearing the wrong size bra or shoes and she had finally put on the correct sizes.

She just felt…right.

Unlike any of the other temporary progress she’d made before falling backwards into the darkness, there was no doubt in her mind that this was a permanent phenomenon. The unexplainable certainty was so deeply ingrained in her that she knew it to be as true as the fact that the grass was green and the sky was blue.

Shelby also knew she needed to thank Levi, to try to convey to him the gift he’d given her. But she wasn’t sure how. How do you thank someone for giving you
yourself
back?

As she stood in front of the man she owed more than he would ever understand, her heart raced and pounded like horses on a track after the starting gates had opened. Blood was rushing so loudly through her head that she could hear it, and her palms were damp. Her head felt like a tornado that was picking up speed as thoughts circled around each other faster and faster.

Even with her mind spinning like a top on a perfectly flat surface and her heart doing its best Secretariat impression, she couldn’t help but notice how ridiculously sexy Levi looked. His brow was slightly furrowed, and concern filled his coffee-colored eyes. His jaw was clenched, and the tension caused a vein to pop out on the side of his neck, which, in turn, caused Shelby to want to lick the entire length of said vein.

Focus
. That was what she needed to do. There were things that needed to be said.

It was just that this was the first time she’d ever talked about what she’d been through. Somehow, she knew that if she wanted to put it behind her and take the power away from her past, she had to talk about it. Once again, Levi was right. He’d said the same thing to her after lunch.

She was terrified, but not in a scary way.

“Before I came here, things got…” As she attempted to force the words out, she tried to breathe, but she was having a difficult time. Just thinking about the night she’d made her Julia Roberts
Sleeping with the Enemy
escape suffocated her.

The irony was not lost on her that the picture from her brother’s wedding that had provoked Kevin the night that she’d left was of the very man that she wanted to thank for helping her find herself again. It was clear by her body’s reaction that, despite opening up to Levi, she couldn’t go into the gory details. Maybe, at some point, she would be ready for that, but tonight was not the night. So, instead of giving him a play-by-play—or, more accurately, a blow-by-blow—she tried to explain the severity without the ugly specifics.

Her voice wavered as she continued. “The night I left Arizona, things got out of control. I knew that, if I didn’t leave then, I might not make it out alive. So I snuck out in the middle of the night and drove to San Diego. I went directly to an urgent care clinic and, from there, was admitted to the hospital for several days.

“When I got released, I drove to Los Angeles for a week to recuperate and to try to come up with a game plan. My options were somewhat limited considering I didn’t want to raise any suspicion. Coming here was really the only viable solution. So, once I was strong enough mentally and physically, I did.”

“I’m glad you did.”

The sincerity in Levi’s tone washed over Shelby in a comforting wave. She wanted to throw herself into his arms and absorb more of his support. But that would’ve been the easy thing to do. If she learned anything from her relationship with Kevin, it was that she had to learn to stand on her own two feet.

“I’m glad I did, too.” Pushing down the vulnerability his gratitude had inspired, she smiled, crossed her fingers and toes, and hoped she’d be able to get through this next part without crying. “I wasn’t sure how long it would take me before I started to feel like myself, think like myself, recognize myself when I looked in the mirror. Being around Matt, Amy, and the girls helped. Bartending here helped. Working on the cabin helped. But the thing that made the real difference was you.”

Levi started shaking his head, clearly not wanting to accept any of the credit. “I didn’t do anyth—”

“Yes. You did,” she said, interrupting him. “First, you practically gift-wrapped—red bow and all—my independence when you gave me a job and a place to stay. Then you humored me by letting me ‘help’ with your renovations on the cabin, which gave me a sense of purpose. And I am beyond thankful to you for those things. But”—Shelby sniffed—“what I am most grateful for is not the job, or the crash pad, or the construction work.”

Levi chuckled, and the smile on Shelby’s face grew wider as tears filled her eyes. She knew that her wish to get through this without waterworks was not going to happen. In spite of her dashed hopes, she pushed on taking a deep breath before she continued.