She’s beautiful, crouched down, ass to heels, a package of crackers in one hand and her other hand on the top of Lucy’s head where she paused as soon as I spoke.
But it’s her eyes, like always, drawing me to her, pulling me closer as though the web of chemistry I’ve always felt between us has finally made its way to her.
“Hey,” Cara says, giving Lucy another rub and pushing to her feet. “Good morning.”
Good morning, indeed. Although it was a better night last night when I was peeling her skintight satin dress off her body and standing there like a jackass, admiring her body, thinking of the way it was going to change in the upcoming months. I only felt slightly disgusted with myself for doing it when she passed out and was unable to see my vast appreciation of her body.
Shame, because with the way she’s eye-fucking me, I think we’re thinking the same thing…
Desire.
I’ve been pretty blunt with what I want from her, especially throwing a relationship with her down like a gauntlet, one she was clearly hesitant to pick up. Last night, after the run-in with the redhead, I’d considered stepping back.
Now? Her gaze is glued to my chest and my abs, and I drop my arms from my chest, letting her look her fill. No way in hell am I backing down.
It’s full speed ahead, picking up exactly where we left off the morning she snuck out on me.
“You should eat.” I push off the wall and snap my fingers, calling Lucy to me, but like she’s behaved since last weekend, with Cara around, Lucy wants nothing to do with me.
“I’m not really hungry. I ate some crackers.”
Lucy wags her tail and nudges her face against Cara’s knee, pushing her forward.
I arch a brow and nod toward Lucy. “Seems Lucy thinks you needs to eat.”
Grinning, Cara shakes her head, a mixture of baffled and amused as she walks toward me. “Dogs are so strange.”
I press my hand to her lower back and pull her flush against me. I don’t give her a second to hesitate before I press my lips to hers, tasting the lingering mint of her toothpaste. “Dogs are good judges of good people. Let’s get you fed.”
“Speaking of feeding me.” She shakes the crackers back and forth. “Seems someone not only brought me food but removed my clothes last night. You wouldn’t know who did that, would you?”
“You were passed out. Did you want to sleep in that dress?”
“No, but…”
“I didn’t touch you.” I grin, thinking of her body. The warmth of her soft flesh as I removed her dress. “At least not too inappropriately. You can scold me all you’d like, but I won’t apologize for taking care of you. Or thinking your body is sexy as hell.”
She humphs, but it lacks impact. She looks too damn cute with her scrunched-up nose and lips.
“Come on. Breakfast. Food. What would you like? I was making eggs and potatoes.”
We reach the kitchen and I slide her onto a barstool facing the worktop where I’d been chopping potatoes before Lucy was alerted to Cara’s shower turning on and off.
“Just potatoes,” she says, and although I want her to eat some eggs for protein, the muted green haze to her skin makes me not push it.
“Potatoes it is. If you’d like more juice, help yourself to the fridge.”
“So you’ve told me about your parents, and you mention you have a brother, but what is your family like?”
My fork full of potatoes is halfway to my mouth when I pause. “What’d I say?”
Cara’s lips are pressed together and she’s looking out the windows. We chatted while I cooked, we talked about the art gallery and how I got my start with opening my first tattoo place. Get-to-know-you bullshit that doesn’t feel like bullshit when I’m talking about it with Cara.
Things have been going, well…easy.
Her happy expression has evaporated and changed to utter sadness.
“You okay?” She still doesn’t speak. “Cara?”
She blinks, pulling herself out of whatever has grabbed her attention, and smiles shyly at me. “Sorry. Your question caught me off guard.” She clears her throat and takes a drink of water, and I notice her hand has a slight tremor to it.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, really, I wasn’t prepared for you to ask about Jimmy.”
She sniffs and I set down my fork. I give her a few minutes, keeping an eye on her. Slowly, a realization settles, because she has that faraway look I know I get in my eyes whenever Stella and I talk about Irvin, and it kills me.
So instead of waiting for her to tell me about her brother, I start speaking.
“I had a mom.” My voice is bland, as it always is when I think about her. “Got knocked up by someone she hooked herself to in order to get money for drugs.”
Cara’s expression changes to surprise and I find myself smiling at the cute way her brows raise and her lips part. “What?”
“Yeah.” I settle my forearms on the table. “Bet Dan doesn’t talk about that much when he talks about me, does he?” She shakes her head but I don’t need the answer. Dan would take my secrets and anything I’ve told him about my life to his grave. “See, I was born addicted to drugs. My mom was clean for a long while after she had me. She’s always said she quit when she found out she was pregnant, but I don’t think she realized she was pregnant for a long while so by the time she stopped, the damage was already done. She told me when I was little I spent six weeks in ICU, born more than a month early, unable to breathe on my own.”
“Braxton—”
“It’s not a big deal.” I smile lightly. It’s not, really. “But I figure we’re getting to know each other and there’s not much in my life I’m ashamed about, but I was always ashamed of that. Not so much anymore. I met this guy when I was twelve. Big old three-hundred-and-fifty-pound mammoth of a man. Irvin. He caught me and a couple buddies trying to shoplift from the 7-Eleven and hauled us out of there so fast, telling the guy at the counter he’d deal with it, I almost shit my pants.”
I laugh at the memory. Irvin was so damn scary that day, I was sure I was either getting hauled off to jail or murdered in some lunatic’s basement. Cara’s face has paled and her mouth is gaping but not one sound comes out.
“Anyway, I was running with the wrong crowd, but I lived in a neighborhood where there was the bad crowd and the deadly one so I was making the best choices I could at the time, and I don’t know what it was that day, still don’t, but Irvin took me in. He gave me a place to stay, made me come to his house after school to help me with my homework, all that shit my mom couldn’t deal with. Lived four blocks away from my own home but after that first day, there was something between us, and his home eventually became more of a home than my own.”
“Wow, it’s good you had that. Good you have someone like that in your life.”
“Yeah, well, Irvin’s son died in a gang when he was thirteen. Joined up despite the fact he had a dad in his life who gave a shit about him, which is better than most of us around there had, so I never really got it because Irvin’s a scary beast, but his heart was just as large. Anyway, I was struggling in school, barely passing, and it was pissing me off because all I wanted to do was get out of that hellish neighborhood and do something.” I paused, took a long drink of my coffee, and glanced out the window. “I couldn’t read, Cara,” I say when I look at her again. “Don’t know if it was the drugs, or I was born wrong, but I couldn’t read. Fucking killed me too, to have everyone think I was so damn stupid.”
“You couldn’t—”
“Nope. Not until about eighth grade, I couldn’t read shit except small words I could memorize, but Irvin helped me out, had me write shit out and he figured out I was writing half my letters backwards or upside down. Eventually, he took me to some doctors and we discovered I have dyslexia.”
I drop the bomb and wait for the look of pity but all Cara does is blink rapidly. “You met Dan in college.”
“Yup.”
“But—”
“Still sucks to read, I’m not going to lie. Takes me three times as long as anyone else, but that’s why I majored in art and then switched to tattooing. Not a lot of reading required, and when I do scripts on people, I have to think of the letters as art drawings and not an actual word. I haven’t messed up yet.” I flash her a grin, belying my own unease with this. “Stella’s from my old neighborhood. I grew up with her, and she’s a fucking whiz with numbers and definitely better with words than I am. I wouldn’t be able to run the business without her.”
“Wow, I mean, I want to say I’m sorry you have to deal with all that.” Her brow scrunches. “Although that doesn’t sound right either. Mostly I’m just really impressed with what you’ve been able to make of yourself even with your disability. I mean, you live in one of the most expensive buildings in Portland, for crying out loud. I’d say you’ve done okay by yourself.”
“Irvin bought this place for me.” Damn. A lump lodges in my throat and I push it down. Then I push away my food. “Not really.”
“I don’t understand.”
I rarely talk about Irvin with anyone anymore, except for occasionally with Stella. Somehow, Irvin became the dad or uncle to the fucked-up kids in our hood. Stella and I are two of the few who took to him like he tried to take to all of us, trying to save us from the shit his son went through.
“He died when I was still in college. Man lived in this crappy, falling-apart two-bedroom home as long as I knew him. Had no clue he’d done some major investing over the years. Man died a multimillionaire and lived like a pauper.” I drop my head and squeeze my eyes closed. I can’t even look at her. “He and I used to sit outside on his crumbling front porch and he’d ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I always told him I had no clue, but I’d point across the river, and tell him, ‘I just want to live high. See what it’s like to live in the sky.’ ”
“Braxton—” Her voice sounds broken and so uncertain.
I lift my head and grin. “He gave me all he had. I gave half to Stella and she reinvested all of it into MadInk. But when I heard I was the beneficiary to all this damn money I never knew the man had, the lawyer had given me a note he’d written. All it said was, ‘You better put this to use, so you can live high in the sky, or I’ll haunt your white ass.’ ”
I chuckle, because the man was always rough, always giving me shit, but fuck…he was a good man. The best man I’ve ever known.
I shove off from the table, needing space, but before I can stand, Cara is in front of me, scrambling onto my lap and straddling me. She throws her arms around me and yanks me to her.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and her voice isn’t only broken, she’s crying. “I’m so sorry you lost such a good man, but I’m certain he’d be so proud of you.”
She holds me tight. I wrap my arms around her waist and hold her tighter. Settling my chin on her shoulder, I grit my teeth. Both of us don’t need to fall to tears.
“I lost Jimmy,” she says, after minutes of us holding each other. “My brother.”
“Yeah?” My hand drifts up her back. I brush hair to the other side of her shoulder and continue running my hand up and down her back, settling her. She’s gripping me tighter like she needs to cling to me to be able to talk.
“Yeah. He died just over a year ago, but he was sick for years before then.” She clears her throat and says, “Leukemia.”
“Shit, Cara. I’m sorry.”
She pulls back, but I still hold her firmly in case she’s planning on running, but instead, she wipes tears off her cheeks. “We were twins. He was older by five minutes, but you’d have thought I had never been born at all with all the attention he got and how little I did. Made him so mad, all the time, the way my parents would expect so much from both of us, but they only ever praised him or acted like he was the only one who could do anything. The day of his funeral, my mom looked right through me, like I wasn’t there, shook her head, and said, ‘I don’t know how I’ll live without my child,’ like she didn’t even realize her other one was standing right in front of her.”
“You kidding me?”
“No.” She blinks harshly and opens her eyes. They’re swirling with emotion, pain, and anger, but I see a spark of determination in them too. “I moved out that day. Quit school. Found my apartment and I decided, screw them. I was only going to law school because it’s what we were supposed to do and I never wanted it in the first place, but I kept thinking if I tried hard enough I could make them love me.”
Jesus. My mom was a drug addict who eventually overdosed, but if we were comparing the two, I’d almost say Cara’s mom is worse. “You shouldn’t have to make her love you, Cara. She’s your mom.”
“I know. That’s what Jimmy always said to me. When he went to hospice, he made me promise I’d get out of there, and I’d live my life. I tried telling him they’d need me, but when Mom said that to me, I knew, like always, Jimmy was right.”
“I’m proud of you for finding the strength to do that, Cara.”
Her smile goes soft and with more tears swimming in her eyes, she whispers, “I don’t think anyone’s ever been proud of me except for Jimmy and Jenna.”
“I am.” I slide my hands to her cheeks, brushing away her tears as I hold her close to me, letting her see how serious I am. “We both came from shit lives, Cara, but we both had people in our lives who were there for us, and I swear to you, right now, I will make sure our child has the best of everything. I don’t care how hard it is, how much work it takes, how much it costs or how little, our child will have everything we didn’t, including two parents who are always there, who will always love him or her—boy or girl.” I grin at her. She blushes and it’s so damn cute I press my lips to hers softly, slowly, soaking in the taste of her and the feel of her.
I don’t push it farther. I don’t take her like I want to, and when she relaxes in my hold, falls into the kiss, I pull back.
Then we spend more time talking about Irvin and Jimmy, laughing over stories while we finish our breakfast and clean up.
It’s the best morning I’ve ever had in my life, until Cara places the last plate she’s cleaning into the cupboard and turns to me.
“I should get going.”
“What?”
“I’m feeling the best I have in weeks, and I haven’t painted in a while. I’d like to try today.”
Oh. Not exactly like I can stop her.
“Sure. Yeah.” Hell if I wanted her to leave though. I like her here, in my home, us talking about heavy shit without it seeming heavy. No one outside a small circle of people knows about my dyslexia. I hate the assumption I’m stupid that comes with it, but Cara just took it all in stride, it never changing the way she looks at me.
Except that’s not really true either, knowing what I’ve struggled with, it’s like her gaze on me is fiercer, more determined to make something good work with me, and that’s the only reason why I’m so willing to take her home now instead of spend all day with her on the couch, eating whatever she wants and can keep down, resting with a remote in one hand and her body wrapped in my other arm.
She’ll be back.
We can do this.
“Let me show you something first.”
“What?”
“Come on.” I take the towel out of her hand and toss it to the counter. I hold her hand while we walk down the hall into a completely empty room that holds nothing other than a white couch and a drafting table. I come in here sometimes when I want silence to draw tattoo designs, but I haven’t had a real use for the room until now. Now I know exactly what it’d be perfect for.
She inhales a quick breath as we enter, and her gaze immediately goes to the wall of windows that overlook the river. It’s my Hail Mary pass, one last chance to get her to see things my way. “Move in with me and you can paint in here.”
“Tempting,” she says teasingly. By the way her eyes gloss over and the lingering look she gives as I walk her out of the room, I think it is tempting her.
I’m totally cool with using all the tools at my disposal to have her stay in my house.