“I wouldn’t go that far,” she countered, refusing to give him the satisfaction.
“Is it contact with people you don’t like, or contact with me?”
Both.
“We should go back inside,” she blurted, trying to shift her leg off his thigh. “Maybe the crowd’s cleared out.”
Brandon’s hand only tightened on her ankle. Firm yet gentle because he knew how fragile she was.
I’m not fragile.
Another lie. The tough girl, I-don’t-need-anyone attitude she presented was smoke and mirrors. People didn’t see it because she was that good of an actress.
Brandon sees it.
She forced the thought from her mind. Nothing like a little denial.
“It hasn’t,” he responded. “Just sit and eat.”
So she stayed only because he was holding her leg. Not because he told her to.
“How often do you get them?” he asked.
Stella lifted the paper cup to her lips and took a shallow sip. “Get what?” she replied with a coy lift of her shoulder. Over the years, she’d gotten good at pretending. At playing that she was so much stronger than she really was. The jokes and independence were just a shield for the shy little girl who’d craved stability.
Brandon shook his head. “You’re good, I’ll give you that. All right, if you don’t want to talk about it…” He leveled her with a look. “But don’t think I’ll forget.”
Why would she ever think that? Brandon West was the type of man who remembered everything. And that made him dangerous.
Her phone vibrated in her back pocket. Brandon watched her as she dug the thing out, his eyes strong and steady and making her hands sweat so damn bad that she almost dropped her phone.
She touched the screen and saw a text from her mom.
The YMCA is offering a kickboxing class and the instructor is a total Channing. Want to take it with me? We could, like, box each other and stuff.
God love her mother. She referred to anyone good-looking as a Channing after Channing Tatum and swore she was going to incorporate the phrase into modern vernacular. Stella refused to use it because…well, she wasn’t anything like her mother. Stella was more of a Chris Hemsworth kind of girl, and she had no desire to “box and stuff” with her mother.
Did you forget I have a leg I can barely walk on, much less box? Why are you at the Y?
“Something important?” Brandon queried from across the table.
“Just my mom,” Stella answered. “She’s supposed to be looking for a place to live but somehow ended up at the Y.”
“Where’s she living now?”
Aaaand cue rehearsed speech. “She came back after Granny died and she’s been living with me.”
Brandon’s lips twitched. “Is that fake enthusiasm I hear?”
See? The man sees everything.
Not many people knew Stella’s history. They didn’t know she was a product of a one-night stand and that she’d never met her father. They didn’t know her mother had the emotional maturity of a sixteen-year-old. Nor had she told many people she’d moved at least twice a year when her mom found yet another man who promised to take care of them.
Promises that had never been fulfilled.
“My mom and I…” Stella’s words trailed off as she searched for the appropriate way to describe Gloria Davenport. “Have a special relationship.”
“And by special you mean she drives you to commit homicide,” he guessed.
Bingo.
Her phone buzzed.
I got bored so I stopped by the Y. Shall I sign us up?
Stella’s teeth sank into her lower lip as she replied. So you got bored after you found a place to live? And, again, busted knee, Mother.
“My mom is different,” Stella explained after replacing her phone. “She likes to have fun and I’m…”
“The straight-laced one,” he finished for her.
Was he laughing at her? Because the half grin turning up the corners of his mouth was really doing funny things to her insides. The parts of her that were asleep most of the time because there hadn’t been anything, or anyone worthy, of waking them up.
Not true.
“I just don’t fly by the seat of my pants like she does. She goes where the wind takes her and I like order.”
Brandon studied her from his kicked-back position in the chair, his thumb moving in slow, even circles over her ankle. The contrast of his worker’s hands to her dancer’s legs shouldn’t have affected her. It shouldn’t feel…erotic. Who knew skin could be erotic? Who knew a simple touch by a man’s thumb could make heat bloom across her midsection?
But it wasn’t a simple touch. No, Stella knew that. Nothing about Brandon was simple.
He only infuriates you because he gets you.
“Is that something you get from your dad?” he asked, sliding the question in so effortlessly that Stella almost missed his attempt at prodding her.
Well played, Mr. West.
“I never knew my dad,” she found herself saying.
He tilted his head and studied her, his chestnut-brown eyes demanding to know all her secrets. “And that’s not something you like to talk about, is it?”
She spun her forgotten coffee in circles. “How could you tell?” As though she really had to ask.
He lifted a thick shoulder in a casual shrug. “We all have closets we try to keep closed.”
“Including you?”
“I’m no different than anyone else.”
Oh, yes, you are.
“And what’re yours?” she prodded, the same way he’d prodded her. Only she’d had to come out and ask. Brandon had a way of sliding casual questions in so easily that Stella had no idea she was answering them until she’d revealed something she didn’t want to reveal.
The thumb on her ankle continued to work in circles. “You really think I open up that easily?”
“Why not? I did.”
He shook his head. “See, that’s where you’re wrong. All you did was deny.”
She lifted her chin and leveled his look with one of her own. “I haven’t denied anything.”
Only denying about denying. No big deal.
Both his thick, dark brows slid up his forehead. “So you admit to having panic attacks?”
Seriously, he just did his sneaky thing again.
“There are ways of overcoming those, you know,” he told her.
His thumb stopped moving, but his hand remained on her ankle, keeping a firm hold as though he suspected she wanted to bolt. And he would be right. Not because she was being touched, though it was odd that being touched by Brandon didn’t set off the same panic that being touched by others did, which was something she wasn’t going to explore. Just yet.
“I’m perfectly fine,” she told him.
He nodded. “All right. Another thing you don’t want to talk about. I get it.”
Did he?
Before she could ask, a shadow fell over their table, blocking the midmorning sun.
And there stood Matt, tall and dark-haired and looking so much like Brandon that it knocked the air from Stella’s lungs.
“Dad, Adrienne and I are going to walk to the diner and get some lunch. She’s going to give me a ride home when we’re done.”
Brandon looked up at his son, but his expression didn’t change. Except maybe the muscle in his jaw tightening.