“You don’t want an apology, then what do you want?” he demanded.
“I don’t know. Maybe pick a lane! Last night you’re all, ‘here’s the studio space I made for you,’ and today you’re shoving me out the door for Chicago. You make a girl’s head spin and not in the good way. More like in the 360-degree way!”
“Okay. Fine. I’m not sorry. You are. Let’s leave it at that,” he said.
“Why did you come here?” she asked as he picked up the mug.
“To make sure you were all right.”
The man was infuriating. He was lucky she hadn’t swamped him in the lake instead of his snowmobile.
“Thank you for showing up for him.”
“I didn’t do it for him.” His tone was surly, gruff.
He looked like he wanted to say more. Like there were words he was fighting back. She was so damn tired of his silence, his mysteriousness.
“Oh, come on! What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded. When they got like this, it was like two firecrackers that just kept reigniting the other. Someone always got hurt, and dammit, she was sick of losing fingers.
He lifted blazing blue eyes to hers. His hands were fisted at his sides, and his nostrils flared. She could very definitely see the veins in his neck now. But she wasn’t about to back down.
“You wanna say something to me, then open your damn mouth and say the damn words,” Remi said.
There was a long beat during which neither one of them moved. They’d never held eye contact this long. She felt undressed, cornered.
And then he started to move toward her. Slowly. Prowling. “I don’t think that’s what you really want, Remi.”
The way his voice, all gravel and whiskey, caressed her name made her legs tremble. There was meaning there. But she didn’t know what. She didn’t have a Brick Callan Dictionary available for translation.
She took a step back, then another one. But he just kept prowling toward her. He set his mug down with a distinct snap. She stopped when her back met the cabinet. Any second now, he’d look away. He’d leave and walk away without giving her a second thought. Just like he’d always done.
But this time he didn’t. He stopped when his boots touched her toes.
“Are you scared, baby?” his voice was a rasp. There was fire in his eyes.
She shook her head from side to side as her pulse rabbited at the base of her throat.
He placed one big hand on the cabinets behind her head and leaned in even closer.
Yep. She was just going to have a heart attack or infarction or whatever the hell it was called when a heart just gave up trying to work.
His beard was magnificent up close. She wondered if anyone had ever told him that before, then decided now wasn’t the time.
“You should be,” he said.
Beard. Heart attack. Sexy hand and lean-in. Oh, right. He’d asked her if she was scared, she remembered, walking it back in her head.
“Why should I be afraid of you, Brick?” she scoffed. Sure, her knees were literally shaking. But it wasn’t from fear. It was so much worse.
“Because…” he said, leaning in closer and closer in slow motion.
She stopped breathing and realized she’d flattened herself against the kitchen wall like a cartoon character pancaked by an anvil. He was so damn tall. She had to tilt her head way back to look up at him. And what she saw in his eyes made her wish she would have looked south rather than north.
He stopped an inch from her. So close that she could feel the hum of awareness firing between their bodies. So close that if she took a deep enough breath her breasts would brush against his chest and her nipples would celebrate.
“Take a breath before you pass out, Remington.”
She took one. A ragged, wheezy one. “Why should I be afraid of you?” she repeated.
He held up a hand like he was going to caress her cheek, but his palm stopped just short of touching her, and he withdrew it. It was his turn to take a jagged breath. “Because if you knew all the things I wanted to do to you, you’d leave town tonight and never look back.”
All the things he wanted to do to her? Like tie her up, throw her in a trunk, and murder her in the woods things?
His lips quirked. It wasn’t a smile per-say. But it was a sign of amusement. “Sometimes I can hear you clear as day in my own head. Sometimes—like when you’re calling from the ice bridge because you’re bloody and stranded—I’m thinking about murder. But most of the time…” His hand was back. And this time, he trailed his index finger down the side of her neck, over her clavicle, and under the neckline of her sweater.
She was on fire. He was touching her. On purpose. The trail his finger left behind was fire, lava, lightning.
“Most of the time?” she repeated.
“I showed up for the same reason I do everything.”
“What’s that?” she pressed. She was getting lightheaded and hoped she wouldn’t do something undignified like pass out at his feet.
“For you, Remi.”
Maybe she wasn’t having a heart attack. Maybe it was one of those strokes that garbled language processing. Maybe he was looming over her, telling her he did what he did because the baby hippopotamus at the Cincinnati Zoo told him to.
She opened her mouth, and nothing came out. No sound. No air. Nothing.
Brick Callan had just pulled the rug out from under her.
“Are you fucking with me right now?” she asked.
Those lips quirked again and she thought for half a second he was going to close the distance, cross that last inch that separated them and kiss the ever-loving hell out of her. She’d probably die from it, but she was okay with that.
But then his eyes were shuttering. The heat between them sputtered out.
He withdrew from her, and she felt the absence like an ache that was never going to be satisfied. Because for whatever reason Brick had, he didn’t want her bad enough to make the move.
“I’m gonna go,” he said without a hint of emotion.
“If you walk out that door without telling me exactly what you mean, you will no longer exist to me,” she warned him.
He paused between her and the door. His back to her. He brought the hand that had touched her to his mouth, then dropped it.
“That’s not how this works,” he reminded her.
“That’s how it works from now on. You either tell me why you keep showing up for me but refuse to tear off my clothes, or this is all over. No more fights as foreplay. No more riding to my rescue. No more family dinners together.”
He turned to face her. Hands on his hips, staring at his boots. “You know the reasons.”
“Tell me.”