Her green eyes flare with amusement, and I know she’s trying not to laugh at me. Dammit. No one in Angola laughed at me. Except A.J., of course. But he laughed at everything.
Evie holds my gaze as she takes an exaggerated step backward. “Am I safe now?”
I roll my eyes, but I work hard to keep my mouth a flat line. “How oldareyou?” I ask with censure.
“Twenty-one.” She ignores my tone. “How old are you?”
I shake my head, refusing to take her bait.
She brings an index finger up to her sensual lips and taps it lightly against them. I swallow. It’s so fucking pretty.
“Let’s see.” Her eyes take me in, assessing me from head to toe. “You’re in your twenties. That’s obvious. Too young-looking to be thirty… ”
She watches me for confirmation, but I give nothing away. That doesn’t mean I feel nothing. Behind my wooden exterior, my heart is racing. Heat flames my cheeks because, for the first time in eight years, a woman is checking me out.
And not just any woman.
A goddamn beautiful, fearless, zucchini-bread-baking, yoga-posing, legs-that-start-on-terra-firma-and-stretch-all-the-way-to-heaven woman who knows I’ve just gotten out of prison and wants to talk to me anyway.
Jesus Christ, I should totally walk away, but I fucking can’t.
“And, as everybody knows, you’ve been gone for awhile.” She keeps that sharp focus right on me as she says this. No glancing away. No dropping her voice to a whisper.
My ab muscles jump as though she’s touched my middle.
She narrows that gaze on me still. “Mrs. Vivian said it was eight years?” Her statement comes out a question. When I nod in spite of myself, something softens in her expression. And this time her voice does drop. “You must have been a baby.”
“I wasn’t a baby,” I say, shaking my head. “I was a grown-ass man.”
“Hmm,” she mutters doubtfully, the softness gone. “Did you know that the male brain doesn’t reach full maturity until age twenty-five?”
I blink. “Where the hell did you hear that?”
Evie gives me a half shrug. “I read it inPsychology Today.You can look it up online.” She watches me for a reaction, but I give her none. “So, basically, you were still a kid, still making decisions the way a kid does, when you—”
“I was eighteen when I broke into that house and got my brother killed,” I spit out, my voice venomous. “Not a kid. Totally legal.”
Her expression doesn’t change at my biting tone. She looks completely calm. Not startled. Not even offended.
Who is this girl?
“So that means you’re like twenty-six or twenty-seven right now,” Evie says, and she smiles with self-congratulation, completely ignoring my outburst.
I give up. She’s too adorable. “Twenty-six.”
She lifts her chin, sizing me up further. “And when’s your birthday?”
I debate not telling her, but I have a feeling she’d figure it out on her own anyway. “April 28th.”
She throws her head back and laughs at the sky. “Oh my God!”
My brows drop. This is not the response I expected. “What’s so funny?”
Evie frames her forehead with her hands, still laughing as though I’ve just made the best joke ever. I’d be embarrassed, but I’m sort of mesmerized watching her laugh. Her all-out smile is brilliant. Radiant.
She’s wearing her hair pulled back again, those dark curls just barely tamed by a light blue elastic band. What would happen if it just snapped under the pressure, and her curls fell around her shoulders?
What the hell am I thinking?