Yours to Keep (13 page)

Ethan narrowed his eyes at her slightly, as if he could read her thoughts. “No, thank you.”

When the waitress left, they both stared at the check in its black folder. The money Ana had taken from the freezer was in her pocket. She’d eaten a nine-buck burger and drunk two five-dollar beers. She could afford to pay for herself. She put out her hand, but he beat her to it, drawing the check from under her fingers and giving her that grin of his. “I’m going to be honest with you.”

That made her a little afraid. She’d been dreading the check, dreading that he’d make a big deal about the fact that she worked for him. Or about the fact that she lived with five other people in a tiny apartment in a run-down mill city.

“I know you’re an independent lady of means who doesn’t need to be supported and coddled.”

She laughed, relieved. She should have known he wouldn’t say anything to humiliate her. He wasn’t that guy.

“But I’m still picking up this tab. Just to make it abundantly clear that this is a
date
and not just a friendly outing.” He raised an eyebrow, which might have made her laugh under other circumstances but only increased the heat she was feeling. “Although I’m getting the feeling by now that you already know that. Unless I’m delusional, which is always possible.”

“You’re not delusional,” she said breathlessly. “But why don’t we split it?”

He held it out of her reach. “Nope. Not an option.”

“I could pick up the tab next time.”

Had she really said that?

He held her gaze, not smiling. “I’m cooking for you next time. My place. How’s next Saturday?”

It was tempting. So tempting. She needed to buy herself more time to think. “What if I
suck at pool? What if you don’t want to see me again after that? Aren’t you supposed to ask me at the end of the date, so you know?”

“I know I want to see you again. But if you want me to wait until after the date to ask you so
you
know, I can do that.”

I know,
she thought, but she kept her mouth shut.

He slipped his credit card into the faux-leather folder and slid it to the side of the table. “And I could tell you that you can pay next time, but the truth is I probably won’t let you do that, either. Old-fashioned streak.”

She should not say yes to another date, should not set herself up to have her heart broken, her life disrupted, her family’s peace endangered. But part of her already knew she’d say yes. To another date.

To anything he asked.

He watched from a polite distance as she lined up a shot. She couldn’t play pool to save her life, but he didn’t care, because she looked so good trying. Actually, that was an outrageous understatement. He was completely undone by the sight of her pink lace thong playing peekaboo with him over the waistband of her jeans. He tried to tamp down his lust, analyzing the array of solids and stripes on the pool table, casting his eyes toward the wall to where their beers sat, side by side on a table. But in the end his gaze kept landing back on that scrap of pink lace with three rhinestones set in a triangle.

He didn’t want to be a caveman, not only because she already had Ed Branch to play that role but because the more time he spent with her the more he liked her. She’d obviously had a very challenging childhood, but she didn’t complain about it. She’d managed a graceful transition from brand-new immigrant to more-or-less-typical American student in what sounded like record time, and yet, despite her competence and confidence, there was something lost about her that called out to him. He enjoyed bantering with her, got a kick out of watching her face when she was flustered. No, that was another understatement. He got hard watching her face when she was flustered. The rising color, the parted lips.

He caught himself staring again as she drew back the cue and nearly missed the white ball, sliding the felt tip off it at a crazy angle, table scratch. She turned, smiling, mouth edibly soft. “Your shot.”

He lined up a tricky shot on the middle pocket, trying to sink the five, but part of his brain was busy wondering if she was as physically distracted by him as he was by her and, if so, how, specifically. Was she sizing him up as he leaned over the table?

His shot was off, wild.

She lined up again, and he moved around the table to grab his beer. It gave him another lovely view of her, an unobstructed sight line down her shirt that he did his best not to gape at: gorgeous curves spilling out of black lace under her sweater. He folded his hands over the end of the cue stick, balanced on its thick end, and laid his forehead there. If he didn’t look, he couldn’t stare, but it didn’t keep the image from haunting his memory.

“I missed.”

She’d appeared right beside him, and he jumped.

“Sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you. You were deep in thought?”

Deep in something, anyway.

If one of them didn’t start making shots, this would be the world’s longest pool game, and he didn’t think he had the patience, or possibly even the self-control, for that.

He wouldn’t get distracted this time. He prepared himself for another assault on that five. She walked over to where her beer sat on the bench against the wall and ended up behind him. He turned and caught her staring. She blushed but didn’t look away, her dark eyes steady and teasing.

He missed the shot.

Now she was laughing at him. “Not on your game, huh?” She dug him in the ribs with her elbow as she stepped up for her next shot. It should have tickled, but instead it felt as overtly sexual as if she’d run a palm down his chest and stomach to his fly. He had to stop himself from grabbing her. Not that anyone would notice if he did—they were surrounded by college students who were doing enough groping of their own.

She sank her four and smirked at him. There was enough invitation in that smirk to ensure that he wouldn’t sink another shot all night. He felt himself getting hard—er, harder.

God, she was going to win this game. He couldn’t let that happen. She took another shot, sank it. Lined up another. He was only a few inches from her. He couldn’t help himself—he put his hand on her waist, let it drift down slightly over the curve of her ass. She looked up at him, shocked, and a smile broke over her face. She narrowed her eyes at him, a
clear invitation that registered as a painful rush of blood into his already steely cock.

He wanted to kiss her, so much that his teeth hurt. And once he kissed her— They should get out of here before he lost it and bent her over the pool table. The thought provoked him to a sudden improvement in his game. He ran the table. When he suggested that they go, she nodded enthusiastically.

They walked arm in arm to the car, their hips bumping, the constraint of his jeans maddening. He’d parked on the street under the glare of a streetlight. He opened her door and waited for her to get settled, then went around and slid in on his side. Slammed his door and turned toward her—

She got a hand in his hair and pressed her mouth to his, a flare of heat he felt down to his toes. He teased her mouth open, felt her tongue flirt with his, then pull back. She caught his lower lip between her teeth, which made him want to get her under him so that he could let her know who was running this show. Instead, he stroked his tongue across hers, a slow, bossy glide that she responded to by arching against him.

He reached for her, touched the curve of her waist, slid his hand up to cup the softness of her breast through the softness of her sweater. Wanted to crawl in and die happy.

He ran his thumb back and forth across her nipple, and she closed her fist around his hair, hard, and whimpered.

Yes.

His other hand found the spot where her sweater met the waistband of her jeans, but before he could slide under she put her hand on top of his.

Stopped him. “Someone might see.”

The car was parked on the street, not far from the brewery. At worst, a roving cop might shine his lights in and send them on their way. To him, the idea of being seen was more titillating than terrifying, but the way she’d said it suggested that she felt otherwise.

“We can’t go back to my place. James is there watching the new Bond movie with Theo. And I know you don’t want to go back to your place.…” A hotel was a possibility, but he didn’t want to make her feel cheap.

“No way.”

“So I guess we don’t have a lot of options. But next Saturday—” He could maybe send Theo over to James’s for the night. “Theo will be out. Will you come over? Let me cook for
you?”

She was so pretty in the strange shifting light, dim except for swaths of glare that flitted over their faces as cars passed. He reached out and pushed her hair behind her ear, cupped her jaw in his hand. “Can I kiss you again?”

Her eyes were big as she nodded.

He bent and kissed her mouth tenderly, but she seized the back of his head and the kiss was on fire a second later. She moaned, her other hand reaching for his sweater, grasping handfuls of it convulsively.

Want. Now.

It had been years since he’d been this hard or had such vivid fantasies of the precise balance of finesse and force he’d apply to the process of thrusting into a woman.

“Jesus, Ana, you’re so f—so hot.”

“Were you going to say ‘so fucking hot’?” she asked against his mouth.

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“You’re so fucking hot.”

She made a low, broken noise and kissed him harder. Hotter.

He hated the emergency brake and gearshift with an unholy passion.

She wrenched herself away. “Yes.”

He loved the sound of that word in her mouth. “Yes, what?”

“You asked if I’d come over on Saturday.”

“You’ll let me cook for you?”

“Yes. At the moment, you could cook
on
me.”

He laughed, put his hand to her cheek, pulled it away when she turned her head and bit his palm.

“I should get home,” she said.

“Let me drive you.”

“You can drop me at the school. I walk home from there all the time.”

It was weird, too weird, but he wasn’t willing to push her any more, not right then.

As they approached her neighborhood, she shifted in her seat, fell silent, and put her hands together in her lap. The neighborhood around Duarte Elementary wasn’t particularly
bad, but it was typical of Hawthorne—sodium-arc streetlights illuminating two- and three-family houses on one street, housing projects one block over, vacant lots and lit-up low-rent grocery stories on the avenue running perpendicular. It gave him a better sense of why she held herself back, this contrast with his dreamy Beacon suburbia. Her life must be very, very different from his. And yet how different could it be? At bottom, he felt their sameness like a thread beneath all the contrasts—family, food, their effortless, playful banter, and that goal they were straining toward emotionally and physically, some kind of union that would take them out of the dreariness of both their lives.

“You won’t let me drop you in front of your own building.” It wasn’t a question.

“Nope.”

“Because of your brother?”

She hesitated. “Yeah.”

He was surprised by how much he didn’t like that. By how much he wanted her to offer him the validation of introducing him to her family. But he recognized that as crazy and premature. This was a first date, even if it had taken a long time to get here. There would be time, later, to crave more—more physical contact, a more intimate knowledge of who she was, a deeper look into her secrets, a chance to know her life.

He brought her to the school, as she’d requested, and pulled up along the curb.

He leaned over. She moaned before his mouth even touched hers. Yes, he thought again. She’d be noisy when he finally got her naked.

His erection strained uncomfortably against denim and safety belt.

If he didn’t die from unfulfilled longing before then.

Chapter 12

“Dime. Dee-meh.”
—“Tell me.”

Ana struggled to her elbows and found her sister sitting on Leta’s bed, watching her. “Have you been just waiting for me to wake up?”

Cara grinned impishly, naturally straight white teeth against deep-mocha skin.
“Sí.”

“Where’s Leta?”

“In the kitchen, getting breakfast. So tell me. How was it?”

“Don’t you have to work?”

“Not until noon.” Cara worked seven days a week at a hair salon on the edge of their neighborhood, refilling shampoo and conditioner bottles, sweeping cut hair off the floor, and generally doing the bidding of the trained stylists. “You need to tell me some good gossip, because my life is so dull. How was the date? Where did you go? What did you talk about? Did you sleep with him?”

Ana laughed. “Slow down. The date was good.”

“Tell me everything. I’m starved for stories. I don’t get out much.”

She knew that her sister’s life was pretty bland—long days of work, evenings spent helping the kids with their homework—and although Cara, against Ricky’s commandments, had a fake Mass state ID, she rarely used it, preferring the company of the television. “You must hear good stuff at work, right?”

“I don’t usually get to stand still long enough to hear people’s stories.”

The only thing that separated the two sisters was timing—pure luck. Sometimes Ana tried to invent a different outcome for Cara, one in which they’d never left D.R. and Cara had gone to
la universidad.
Or one in which their father had joined them in the U.S. and eventually applied for a green card, and they’d moved back and forth freely between their two homes, giving Cara a chance to stay connected to her friends. Of course, it was terrible to imagine away Marco and Angel and Leta, but at the same time she loved to think of her sister still young at thirty-two instead of nearly an old woman, thriving instead of merely surviving.

“He picked me up at the train station. He drives a nice car. Leather seats. Heated.”

“I’ll bet,” Cara said with a leer.

Ana made a face at her. “He took me to the brewery, and we had burgers and beers and shot pool.”

“Why do I feel like you’re leaving out the good stuff?”