Wait. “It has?” I asked, torn between his comment a moment before and the one that had just come out of his mouth. I’d thought he was trying to say he wanted to take care of me, but now…
“You are the most ridiculous fucking woman I have ever met in my entire life, Diana. Half the time I want to shake you and the other half of the time….” He trailed off, glaring right into my eyes.
In the second that followed that fraction of time, that muscular arm that had slashed across my chest to keep me in place moved. His hand, that long-fingered, callused hand, slid behind my neck, and Dallas kissed me. His lips touched mine, gentle, barely a brush, a whisper of a warm mouth and breath over my own.
And then he went for it. There was no hesitation, no warning peck. That fuller upper lip went over the top of mine, those blunt, white teeth caught my bottom one… and then he was kissing me.
Over and over again. Softer, then softly, then just soft.
Then I didn’t hesitate. I opened my mouth and caught his top lip the instant my brain caught up with what was happening. His mouth slanted over mine, his tongue sliding into the slight opening I’d given him. One tongue against the other, one hand covering the back of my neck while the other clutched at my hip. My hands? They might have been on his ribs, or they might have been on his thighs, I had no idea. All I could think about was Dallas. Dallas, Dallas, Dallas. How much I wanted this. How much I wanted this more than I’d ever wanted just about anything.
My hands kneaded. His hands kneaded.
His lips drifted away from mine, skirting my jaw, sucking an earlobe briefly before he trailed his damp, warm mouth down my neck like he was hungry, like the world was going to end if he didn’t kiss me everywhere with everything in him. His tongue grazed the skin on my throat, his lips skimming before his teeth made contact. And God help me, all I could do was move closer to him, almost climbing on to his lap. I started leaning forward when it hit me.
What the fuck was I doing? He was married. Separated. Same shit.
“Oh my God,” I hissed, rearing back so fast, he was still where I’d left him when his hooded eyes opened. I pointed at him, the blood I usually had in my head going down. “You’re married.”
Dallas blinked slowly. His Adam’s apple bobbed and the hand he had on my thigh stayed exactly where it was as he focused those amazing eyes on me, looking only slightly dazed. “Diana,” he said my name like he’d never said it before as his thumb slipped over my knee. “My divorce was finalized.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“He’s finally divorced?” Vanessa’s voice was as close to excited as her normally pretty even-temperament allowed her to be. “Since when?”
“Yes!” I, on the other hand, was not so even tempered. I’d been dying to tell her what the hell I’d found out two days ago, but the instant I was up the next morning, I went straight to making breakfast, feeling more than a little like shit from how much I’d drank the night before, and headed right to the salon. By the time I got off work, all I wanted to do was pass out on the couch. I’d fallen asleep two hours after getting home. “A few weeks.”
A few weeks. I still couldn’t wrap my head around that. Weeks. Since right after the fire. When he’d left for a few days.
“What did he say after that?” Van asked.
How could I explain the look he’d given me after he said he wasn’t married anymore? Or how his hand had slid further up my thigh and squeezed my leg like he owned it? There wasn’t a way to. All I had managed to do was sit there looking at him while my heart ran a marathon inside my chest.
“Nothing, I just sat there and stared at him and he stared back at me, and then he drove us home. He parked his truck at his house, walked me home, and all he said was ‘Goodnight, Diana,’” I relayed the information back to her.
“Did you say something to him?”
“I told him thank you for the ride and goodnight?” It hadn’t been my finest moment. I hadn’t even looked him in the eye, but I didn’t tell Van that.
Either way, she still went with “What a chicken.”
“Chicken? Coming from you? Really?”
Vanessa scoffed. “What are you talking about?”
Did I really need to remind her about her non-relationship with her now-husband years ago? “I like him. I don’t know what to do, wah, boohoo,” I recapped.
Her response was a grunt. “Shut up.”
“It’s all right, Chicken Little. Don’t give shit if you can’t take it. At least I told him I sort of liked him before.”
“Now that you mention it, I seem to remember you telling me to quit being a pussy.”
“That was a completely different situation, you idiot.”
“How?”
“You were married!”
She thought about it for a second before huffing. “Whatever. Eat shit. What I want to know is what are you going to do about it?”
Wasn’t that the question of the century? What was I going to do? Dallas had kissed me. Really kissed me. Not this peck on the side of the mouth that you gave someone you were fond of… unless I’d gotten him totally wrong and maybe now that he was divorced, he was planning on making up for not dating for years.
That single thought left a huge lump of rotting crap in my belly.
Was that what was happening? He was taking his brand-new freedom card and using it on me?
He had to know it wouldn’t work. He had to. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that he wouldn’t do that to me. I’d made it clear to him time and time again that I was a crazy person. Plus, I had the boys. I couldn’t be doing that “getting around” crap. Plus-plus, we were neighbors. If he wanted to hit it and quit it, I was the worst option in the world, and he had to know that.
He had to.
I wasn’t going to believe otherwise. But that was the problem, what was I supposed to believe?
“Di?” Van’s voice came over the line, worried.
“Sorry, I spaced,” I apologized, shoving the thought of his reasoning aside. “I don’t know. He just got divorced. Does he want to date around? Does he want to date me? Did he only want to kiss me? I don’t know. We never talked about it. It always just seemed like this far-off thing that was never going to happen.” This felt like high school all over again. “We see each other too much for this to be something that will end badly. I like him too much for that to happen, too, I guess.”
“Okay, Negative Nancy. Ask him, or give it some time. I don’t know. You’re the one with all the boyfriend experience.”
All the boyfriend experience? This bitch. “I was almost nineteen when I lost my virginity, asshole, and I’ve had four boyfriends. I’m not exactly an expert here. I don’t know what the hell is happening. I don’t know what his plan is.”