“More than you?”
“Different than me.” He relented. “Perhaps not more.”
“A family of softies.”
The sound he made was somewhere between a huff of indignation and a growl. “I have never been called soft.”
She looked at him. The wall of muscle that was his chest. The granite set of his jaw. She meant her response to be light. Funny. But looking at him took her breath. “No. I don’t suppose you have.”
There was a small ice-cream parlor up the way, and she was more than grateful for the distraction. “I want ice cream,” she said.
“Ice cream? Are you a child?”
“Ice cream is not just for children,” she said gravely. “Surely you know that, Javier.”
“I don’t eat ice cream.”
“Nonsense. Everyone needs ice cream. Well, unless they’re lactose intolerant. In which case, they just need to find a good nondairy replacement. And let me tell you, in Southern California they’re plentiful.”
“I’m not intolerant of anything.”
She tried, and failed, to hold back a laugh. “Well, that just isn’t true. I’ve only spent a few days in your company, but I can tell you that you’re clearly intolerant of a whole host of things. But, it’s good to know that dairy isn’t among them.”
“You are incredibly irritating.”
“Not the first time I’ve heard that.”
“And who told you that?”
“My older brother, for a start. Also, my surrogate older brother, Dante. He’s now my brother-in-law, incidentally.”
“That seems convoluted.”
“It’s not really. Not at all. Just the way things ended up. My father quite literally found him on a business trip and brought him home. Took care of him. I think my sister was in love with him for most of her life.”
“But you weren’t.”
She laughed. “I remember very clearly telling Minerva that I didn’t like men who were quite as hard as Dante.”
A tense silence settled between the two of them. She hadn’t meant to say that. Because of course that implied that perhaps it had changed. And perhaps there was a hard man that she might find appealing after all.
She gritted her teeth.
“And I still don’t,” she said. “So. Just so we’re both clear.”
“Very clear,” he said.
“Now. Ice cream.” She increased her pace and breezed straight into the shop. And she did not miss the look of absolute shock on the faces of the proprietors inside. It wasn’t to do with her. It was to do with Javier.
“I saw that there was ice cream,” she said cheerily. She approached the counter and looked at all the flavors.
“We make them all here,” the woman behind the counter said, her voice somewhat timid. “The milk comes from our own cows.”
“Well, that’s wonderful,” Violet said. “And makes me even more excited to try it.” There was one called Spanish chocolate, and she elected to get a cone with two scoops of that. She kept her eyes on Javier the entire time.
“You don’t want anything?”
“No,” he said, his voice uncompromising.