“Lily—”
She moved back and opened the car door beside her, putting it between them. A barrier. A deliberate barrier. “I can call nine-one-one for you. Maybe you’re hurt.”
“Your name is Lily Holloway.” He threw it at her, but she didn’t react. She only gazed back at him with her too-blue eyes, and he realized he must have knocked that cap from her head when he’d kissed her so wildly, as her hair gleamed in the streetlight’s glow, a strawberry blond tangle. He recognized that, too. That indefinable color, only hers. “You grew up outside San Francisco. Your father died when you were a toddler, and your mother married my father, Gianni Castelli, when you were a teenager.”
She shook her head, which was better than that blank stare.
“You’re afraid of heights, spiders and the stomach flu. You’re allergic to shellfish but you love lobster. You graduated from Berkeley with a degree in English literature after writing an absolutely useless thesis on Anglo-Saxon elegies that will serve you in no way whatsoever in any job market. You have a regrettable tattoo of your namesake flower on your right hip and up along your side that you got as an act of drunken rebellion. You were on a spring break trip to Mexico that year and sampled entirely too much tequila. Do you think I’m making these things up to amuse myself?”
“I think you need help,” she said with a certain firmness that didn’t match his memories of her at all. “Medical help.”
“You lost your virginity when you were nineteen,” he threw at her, everything inside him a pitched and mighty roar. “To me. You might not remember it, but I bloody well do. I’m the love of your goddamn life!”