Page 10 of Mountain Man's Summer Drift
“I read a lot of books.”
I almost laughed. She must have found it amusing too because the corners of her mouth twitched.
“I dated a couple of other people,” she said. “Both very nice. Both very normal. Neither one of them looked at me the way you’ve been looking at me since this morning.”
I went still.
She kept looking at the river.
“I don’t actually know what I’m doing right now,” she said. “I’m sitting on a rock with a man I met a couple of hours ago and I’m telling him about my college boyfriend. I don’t do this. I’ve never once in my life done this.”
“Why are you doing it now?”
She finally looked at me. “Because I think I want to.”
I set my water down on the rock.
I’d known since the road this morning. I’d known when she gave me the one-word answer. I’d known when she didn’t apologize for being on the gravel, and I’d known when shereached to open the truck door. I’d been waiting for the rest of me to catch up, and now it had.
“Sunnie?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m going to be honest with you about something.”
“Okay.”
I picked my words carefully because I only had the one shot at saying them right.
“I have not, in fifteen years of living wherever the job was, looked at a woman and known what I knew when you looked down that gravel drive this morning. I don’t know what to call it. I’m not going to dress it up. But I’d like you to know that I’m not playing around here, and I’m not going to pretend I am to make it easier on either one of us.”
She held very still.
“I don’t know what to do with that,” she said.
“You don’t have to do anything with it. I’m just telling you where I am.”
She set her bottle next to mine. Her hand was shaking. Not a lot. Just enough that I noticed.
“There’s something I should tell you,” she said.
“All right.”
“I’ve never been with anyone.”
She said it flat, the way she’d said most things, the way you announce a fact about the world. I watched her face while she said it. She wasn’t embarrassed. She was braced.
“All right,” I said again.
“That’s it?”
“What did you expect me to say?”
“I don’t know. Most men say something.”
“Like what?”
“They get weird. They get loud about how it’s not a problem. They make a big deal about how lucky they are or they tell methey don’t want the pressure or they get this face like I’ve handed them a fragile object they didn’t ask for. There’s a face.”
