I shook my head, tried to force my fingers into clawing at his arm so he would let me up. All I could manage was to curl my hands around him and hold on for dear life.
“Nothing is happening,” I repeated. “The annulment—”
“Shh, baby. I won’t tell if you won’t,” he whispered hot against my ear. “You seemed to enjoy being in my bed, love…at least until I fell asleep and you ran off in the middle of the night. Why did you do that, Ashley? Haven’t I earned even the smallest explanation?”
I blinked, tears threatening. Even if I didn’t already understand and genuinely appreciate all the ways I had been wrong about Cayce, he really had earned an answer. Despite the burden of the practice’s financial woes eating at him, he had directed his efforts at saving my family home.
Curling into him, I rested my head against his chest, my face turned inward so I wouldn’t have to worry about him looking at me in what little light there was in the room. For a few long minutes I said nothing, just stayed in his arms, one of his strong hands petting my hair while the other cupped and caressed my elbow.
“I got up to go pee…”
“Pretty much how all stories start,” he teased after I paused for too long.
I snorted, a smile fending off the continuing threat of tears.
“There were condom wrappers in the trash can.”
He kissed the top of my head. “I let Jess use the place for more than showering.”
I patted his chest. “That was what else I talked to him about this evening.”
Cayce chuckled and threaded his fingers through my hair. He forced my head back, my face tilted upward.
“I knew you were holding out, baby.” He took a slow bite of my bottom lip, drawing it away from me before releasing it with a slick pop. “You should always tell me the whole truth. No omissions.”
I wasn’t going to agree with that, so I eased my head around until I could hide from him again, my breath warming his chest as I whispered further explanations.
“You had sheets of paper with phone numbers and names. The ones that hadn’t gotten too wet to read looked like the names of women. And it appeared that you were rating them, things like ‘beauty’ and ‘gordita.’”
He snorted. “Makes me wish Chalupa had been the one to find Sammie’s weed stash that Friday.”
“Me, too.” I patted his chest again, the gesture a tap dance of indecision. “Thinking the names and numbers and condom wrappers were all connected led me to thinking about how you’d been gone most of the year.”
“I’m sorry, baby.” He squeezed me tight, tilted my head again and softly kissed my face, his mouth moving from near my eye, to a spot against my cheek and then to the corner of my quivering lips. “I had reasons, but none of them were actual excuses.”
I shrugged, tending to agree. If either of us had reached out to one another earlier, we would have less of a mess to clean up. I would have had my nose in the books earlier and our expenses might have merged earlier. And I never would have dated that moron Howard.
“All that made me think about other things, about how I don’t look like any of the women you’ve ever dated. And I certainly don’t look like the one you wanted to marry.”
Cayce shifted, my weight moving so that we were curled around one another as we shared the seat of the extra wide chair. The new position let him bury his face against my neck. He stayed like that for maybe a full minute, his breath filtering through my hair to warm my neck.
“I’ve always thought you were beautiful, Ash.” His thumb caressed the line of my collarbone. “But you had to grow up before I could appreciate that beauty as a man.”
I wondered what age that was supposed to be. Michelle had been his last girlfriend before he buried himself in his work with daddy as a veterinarian. She hadn’t been a waif like Danay, but she was still half my size or smaller. I was twenty-three when they were dating.
Brushing some of my hair aside, he nipped at my ear. “Baby, a man goes out fishing, he wants to come home with a trophy. He comes back with something else, he doesn’t brag about catching a little fish, does he?”
Sitting there in the dark, I eye rolled him so hard it hurt.
“You might have bragged about fishes you caught, but you never bragged about your girlfriends,” I pointed out. In fact, he had never said much about them at all.
“My point exactly!” Sounding like he’d just won the debate, Cayce snuggled closer to me. “Baby, I brag about you all the time, how smart, how feisty, how good-hearted you are.”
I waited a few seconds for him to add another quality, especially THE quality that my insecurities hinged on. When he didn’t, I snorted.
“That’s it, that’s all you’ve got to brag about?
“Bay-bee,” he growled in two flustered syllables. “You don’t understand. A man doesn’t lead another man to his fishing…uh—”
“Oh my God!” I blurted and pulled as far back as I could without tipping out of the chair. “You were going to say ‘hole,’ weren’t you?”
A little click at the back of his throat told me that was just the word that had knotted up his tongue at the last second.
“Cayce Edward Gerard, admit it, you were going to say ‘hole.’”
“Yes, baby, I was,” he admitted, pulling me close again. “But not like that. Let me think up another analogy.”
I turned into him and waited, my palm flat against his bare chest. “Okay, shoot.”
“I’m thinking.”
He sounded nervous, like everything in his world depended on him coming up with the right words.
I kissed along the line of his collarbone, then up his neck to his ear to whisper.
“I’m waiting.”
“Mmm?” His head leaned into my kisses. “You’re making it hard, Ash.”
Kissing the curve of his jaw, I trailed my fingers down his chest and over his abdomen.
“Making what hard?”
“Everything,” he rasped.