“Glory, you don’t know what thehell—”
In a single abrupt movement she flung herself off his lap and shouldered the door of his car open and all but toppled from the car. She staggered a bit to get her footing, her arms pinwheeling, and it might have been funny if he hadn’t been so furious. She stalked off into the dark walking backward.
“Don’t you dare follow me,deputysheriff,”she growled.
Glory would make her way home safely. Her temper would singe everything in her path.
But he was going to follow her surreptitiously anyway, just to make sure.
“Wouldn’t dream of it! Tell Mr.Hollywood I said hi!” he shouted after her.
“HE HAS ANAME.”
“What is it? JACK Q. ASS?” he yelled after her.
“Yeah, and the ‘Q’ stands for CUTE!” she bellowed with a stomp of her foot and a melodramatic flail of her arms.
“Jesus, what are you,nine years old?”
Which was basically the pot calling the kettle black at this point.
He heard her blackly mutter something in reply he probably didn’t want to hear.
“Fuck fuck FUCK.” His words reverberated all through his empty car and the thirdFUCKabout shredded his throat from the volume as he pulled his door shut.
He’d gone from feeling hypnotized by lust to feeling blackly livid and faintly ridiculous, sitting here alone in the car with a huge erection. He’d get the emotional bends at this rate.
He flung himself back in his seat and gave a dark, ironic laugh.
She was so damn smart, and boy did she know him, in all his strengths and vulnerabilities: his reasons for shutting down hot front-seat sexweren’tall noble. She’d closed in on a truth he’d prefer to hide even from himself, because he didn’t know how to master it.
Hewasafraid... of not being enough for her. And of having her and then losing her to someone like Francone, and frankly... he didn’t know how he’d get over that.
But how could he ever tell her something like that?
And he’d probably just driven her into Francone’s arms.
Thiswas his punishment for carving their initials on the damn Eternity Oak all those years ago.See, Glory?He wished he could shout after her. This is what happens when you don’t think things through. This ceaseless existential torment. The never-satisfied boner. A yearning that felt like your insides were being steadily stretched on a rack.
He felt like he’d said some of the right things. But he could never seem to saytheright thing.
And maybe the only way to win this game was to simply stop playing it.
And as he stared at that bulletin board of The Baby Owls, three guys who got a wondrous break, the kind of break Glory deserved, too, his radio crackled into life.
“Got another call, Eli, from Cora Ludlow at Heavenly Shores. She thought she heard a loud argument. Someone was shouting the F word.”
That was almost funny.
“Be right there,” he said evenly.
Since he was already right there, he got out and walked about a hundred paces upward, into the pines, down into a clearing, and fixed his eyes on one spot.
And when a shadow appeared, and Glory stepped into the rectangle cast by the porch light and disappeared into her house, he exhaled and turned back to this car. Despite everything, nothing would be okay again if she wasn’t.
Chapter12
She woke up because the place between her nose and upper lip was strangely hot. She opened one eye and discovered it was because her blinds were haphazardly closed and the sun was lasering down on her in that spot.