Page 24 of True Ruin

“Careful,” he said, his voice going rougher around the edges. “I may start believing you’ve somehow got my number.”

Gabi’s pulse gave one hard, stupid kick, and for a reckless second, kissing him seemed less like a terrible idea than the best thing she’d done all night. All year, maybe. She couldn’t remember the last time wanting someone had hit her this bluntly, with no room to pretend it was anything else.

Dallas looked down at the saucepan, but not fast enough. She saw the way his hand tightened on the spoon, the way his mouth flattened, the way he seemed to catch himself right at the point of doing something neither of them could laugh off. Then the shutter came down. He slid his glasses to his brow, rubbed the bridge of his nose, suddenly looking much older.

“I should have known,” he said, stirring once, twice. “That’s the part that got me pulled. Not the blast. Not the stitches. Not the ankle. My editor’s seen worse from me.” His voice stayed even, which somehow made the next thing he said harder to hear. “Trouble is easy to spot if you know what to look for. If you’ve been trained to know, and I have. If you’re not exhausted, hungry, arrogant, and thinking about the lead paragraph instead of the man standing ten feet away who’s about to leave a suitcase with an explosive inside. I had a kid with me. Sixteen. A runner. Local boy. They know the alleys, the checkpoints, who’s talking, who isn’t. You pay them for information and tell yourself that makes it business. Ten seconds more, and I could have gottenhim killed. I only went there to get him out, which was viewed as a mistake, too.”

Her stomach clenched, her fingers curling around the lip of the island. “Dallas.”

“The guy with the suitcase had shaved to fit in,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken. “That was the tell. The hotel was mostly military, some journalists, aid workers coming in and out. You learn to look at shoes, hands, coats, who’s sweating when it isn’t hot. But he’d shaved that morning, or maybe the night before. Lower half of his face was pale. Too pale. Like the beard had come off and the sun hadn’t had time to touch the skin underneath. That was the damned tell.”

He nodded toward the window, though there was no sky to see, only rain and his reflection. “No sun on it yet.”

A small ache opened in her chest before she could guard against it.

“I saw it. I did. Just not fast enough to know what I was seeing. Like a gut reaction before my brain engaged.” He turned off the burner, but his hand stayed on the knob. “Someone shouted. Maybe me. I moved because everyone moved. I pushed the kid, Rafael, out ahead of me, thank God. Then the lobby came apart.”

The kitchen seemed to vibrate, cozy and too protected for the disturbing things he’d just shared. The opposing scents of garlic and chocolate in the air. Rosemary on the cutting board. Raindrops on the windowpane. Dallas standing there making sundaes while he talked about a man, a suitcase, and exploding rooms.

“Dallas.”

He reached for bowls like he hadn’t heard her. Or like he had, and couldn’t afford to hesitate. “For the record, this should be served warm enough to compromise your good sense.”

Gabi slid off the stool before she decided if she had the right.

He glanced over, bowl in one hand, his bad ankle angled back, most of his weight riding on the good leg. His mouth had gone hard, but his eyes were cut green crystal behind glass, that hazel ring glimmering in the pendant’s light. Trouble enough on its own. But the whole battered, stubborn, beautiful mess of him reached past every defense she had.

“Don’t,” he said, firmly enough to tell her he meant it.

Gabi stopped halfway around the island. “Don’t what?”

“Look at me like I need fixing, like I’m so fucking fragile I’ll come apart. My family is doing that right now, and I don’t want it from you, too. You’re the only person who’s going to hear this story.”

Frustration burned through the lingering ache. Good. Frustration she knew what to do with. “Bad news is, I have a son who withdraws when his emotions get the best of him. I know that trick,” she said, climbing back onto the stool.

Dallas’s jaw flexed. For a moment, she thought he might argue. Because he’d given her what she wanted, and now she’d had the nerve to ask for more. Instead, he picked up the sundaes and came around the island. Gingerly, because of the ankle. Deliberately, because of everything else. In a move that felt distinctly like a challenge, he took the stool beside her and turned it enough that his knee angled between her and the island—not trapping her exactly, but close.

Making sure she was close enough to breathe him in: chocolate and rain-damp cotton, the hint of wine on his breath. Close enough towant.

“You hate it,” she said. “Being sidelined.”

“I’m not good at it. At being still.” His eyes held hers. Guarded, but daring.

As the air around them pulsed, Gabi glanced at his hand resting on the counter between them. Long fingers. Slender, like a pianist’s, except for the jagged scar across one knuckle.At the edge of his sleeve, black ink curved over the muscle of his forearm. A compass rose. Something a young man would get when he believed choosing a direction meant he controlled where he’d end up.

She put her hand over his before she could talk herself out of it.

Dallas went still, that thing he hated, but his pulse jumped beneath her fingertips. “You must be bored out of your mind here,” she whispered, because if she said anything else, she would embarrass them both.

His thumb shifted enough to brush the side of hers. “In Promise?” he asked, his mouth curving, but the smile didn’t quite protect him this time. She saw straight through the charm. “With you breaking apart in my arms, like you didn’t know I was ten seconds away from it myself, something that hasn’t happened since I was thirteen.” His gaze dropped to her mouth and whatever was left of their safe little space evaporated. “With you licking wine off your finger, then looking at me like you’re one bad decision away from climbing into my lap?”

Heat climbed her throat so fast she nearly choked on it. His hoarse confession was making her thighs clench, her core melt. Making her remember the hard line of his body against hers, the guttural sound in his throat when she came. She stared at him, stunned and burning and furious that he’d admitted his need before she’d found the courage to admit hers.

“No, Gabi,” he said, the words scraped clean of humor. “I’m not bored. I love the cotton fields almost as much as Campbell does. I love sweet tea, and how the cicadas get so loud at dusk they make your ears ache, then soften after dark like they’ve decided to forgive everybody. I love that people in town wave at you when they pass, whether they know you or not. I love my family, even if I don’t know how to let them get close. I love that Justin keeps sketching around me like I can’t see him doing it,and I know one of these days I’m going to end up in that gallery of his looking miserable but understood. A painting entitledMisjudged Soulor something.”

His thumb moved against hers again, his breath breaking free on a groaning sigh.

“And this—” He looked down at their hands, then back at her. “Whatever the hell this is, whatever we’re doing, I’m so damn far from bored. But don’t idealize me, Gabi. Don’t make me the good man in this now because I wasn’t the one making you feel small then. If I’d been crueler in high school, louder, I don’t know, you might’ve looked my way. But I’m no saint now. I have a flash temper. I’m impulsive. According to my family, I hold grudges long enough for them to establish residency.” His mouth shifted, his smile fading. “I understand what it’s like to be made to feel small, and I get no pleasure out of doing that to anyone else.”