“I remember seeing you once before,” he rumbled deeply. “Before any of this.”
“You did?” The question popped right out, elongating my spine and parting my lips.
He nodded faintly, tipping his chin up.
“Your hair was different.”
Ah. He’d seen my natural burgundy brown. Same color as my mom back before I wanted nothing to do with her. Nothing to share with her. Nothing tying me to my shitty parents.
“What was I doing?” Leaning forward, I felt giddy, ready to snatch up and devour a morsel from our past he’d kept hidden until now. I liked knowing we had a history before this trip. It felt personal.
It felt important and ours.
James’ stare did this thing where it turned smokey and starry in tandem, hazy and high and crystal fucking clear all at once.
“It was my third year working for the bureau but my first year working for your dad. I was outside his office waiting to go in for a briefing when this girl, all of ninety pounds, came tearing out of his office like a goddamn tornado. You stomped right by me but never looked my way.”
Absentmindedly, I wet the pad of my finger in slow taps against the side of my sweating glass. Narrowing down which time I’d blown up at Dad’s work to pinpoint the day James saw me would be tricky. I’d unleashed enough screams within those walls that I’d bet a few of their tormented echoes were still stuck in the pockets of the room.
“It looked like you’d been crying.”
Lifting my gaze to him, disappointment had prematurely dampened my voice.
“Is that why you remembered me?”
James ducked inside his head instead of answering, quietly observing me. Immediately, I felt his silence skitter beneath my skin as his stare picked me apart. It went up and down, back and forth from my right fingertips to my left.
His silence, his state of doing nothing but staring at me felt more than most things did nowadays.
On the short list of things I craved, it quickly edged numbness out of its longstanding spot at number two.
I wanted his quiet, his loud, his rough, his soft. I wanted his destruction and protection and every shade of gray in between smeared all over me. I wanted James on tap dripping through my veins, filling me up with his addictive sunshine and ruinous rains.
A calculated movement, he sat up straight and inclined himself over the table like I was and brought his orbit that much closer. I canted closer, not even thinking.
“I remembered you because agents three times your age parted like the red fucking sea for you when you came their way, and it’s hard to forget someone in such a tiny package who wields that kind of power.”
Small quivers shook a careful smile up my lips. James watched it blossom. He was getting really bad at not staring at my mouth.
“Am I drunk already or was that almost a compliment?”
Raising his stare from my smile, intensity bathed his expression. “It wasn’t almost one.”
Pressure mounted on my chest as we held onto one another, not too heavy that I couldn’t breathe, but not so light that it wasn’t distracting. It felt like it did when we were in the woods—not entirely pleasant but not painful either.
Like something was squeezing my half-dead heart.
“You like me,” I casually accused, confidence holding onto my soft smile.
His nostrils flared wide, his tells switching up and down my face trying to decide whether my tilted lips or my eyes were a safer bet to land his focus on. In the end, he settled on the table next to us, grabbing and finishing off the last of his mimosa with a grumble.
“When your mouth is shut and I don’t want to throw you over my knee on a minute to minute basis, sure. You’re tolerable.”
I tsked him, retreating to rest my back against the chair and kicking my foot up to rest on his thigh. “Don’t you know it's bad manners to speak with a mouth full of lies?”
Black eyebrows slashing together, his lips pursed. He didn’t move my foot.
“What’d I lie about?”