Bittersweet, Shelby imagined, but she’d never know for sure. She’d never feel for her mother what Reece felt for his parents. If Katrina died tomorrow, the shock of it would hurt, yeah, but the loss of the possibility of a good relationship with her mother would hurt worse. And in her heart, she knew she’d be mostly…relieved.
“I wish I could have met your parents, Reece. They sound like good people.”
“They were.” He gave a small smile, a sexy uptick at the corner of his mouth. “Mom would have loved you. Dad…he wouldn’t have known what to make of you, either.”
She nudged him with her shoulder. “We’re two peas in a pod.”
He laughed. “Hardly.”
“You should laugh more often.”
“Yeah?” He glanced over at her, a mischievous glint in his eyes as he lowered his head, closing the distance between their mouths. “Does it turn you on?”
“Oh yeah,” she breathed, in the moment before his lips touched hers.
Reece took his time with the kiss, a slow caress with no sense of urgency. Just like that last kiss in the closet before Dylan interrupted them. She trembled at the sweetness behind it and fisted her hands in his jacket, intending to push him away, but instead drawing him in closer. She didn’t want this tenderness from him, though. Hard, dirty, lust-slaking sex? Yes, absolutely. But anything more than that, no matter how much she secretly yearned for it, would only end in broken hearts. It was too much.
For once, she broke the kiss first.
He drew away slightly, confusion in his eyes. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t sound very convincing, even to her own ears, so she made herself smile despite her heartbeat thundering nervously. “Yeah, everything’s fine. But we should go. It’s getting late, and I’m supposed to meet with the arson investigators tomorrow to talk about The Bean Gallery.”
The confusion morphed into concern. “Did you tell them you’re the owner?”
“Yes. They weren’t happy with me for withholding the information.”
And the concern nosedived into alarm. He stood. “They don’t think—are you a suspect?”
“No. No,” she added more firmly when he started to pace.
He stopped in front of her. “I’m going with you tomorrow. I want to tell them I was there.”
“That’s up to you, but I don’t think it’s necessary.”
“I do.” He held out a hand to help her up. “Let’s go home.”
Chapter Seventeen
On the way downstairs, Shelby paused and studied the framed photos hanging in the stairway. She hadn’t noticed them earlier, but now that she knew more about his family, she had to stop and look. Some candid shots, some posed, some obviously from school. She studied those first because school photos were always a riot. They appeared to have been taken the school year before their parents died—Reece was about twelve in his.
“Oh, man. You were a nerd!” An adorable nerd, yes, with his unruly dark hair and clunky glasses.
“What do you mean, were?” he said from the bottom of the stairs. “I still am.”
“You said it, not me.” She traced the frame of the photo. “Were you picked on a lot in school?” In her experience, high schoolers mercilessly teased anyone not like them. She’d certainly wanted to go all Carrie on more than one “cool” kid during those endless four years.
She turned to find him watching her with those unnervingly intense eyes of his. She sometimes wondered if he could see through her to the scared little girl she kept locked away inside.
“Were you?” Her voice wobbled, and she cleared her throat, infusing her words with as much cheer as she could muster. “Picked on, I mean?”
“No.” He came back up the stairs and tapped Greer’s picture on the wall next to his. It showed the same square jaw, hard mouth, and wide shoulders, but fewer shadows hid in the eldest Wilde brother’s dark eyes.
“Nobody ever wanted to piss off Greer. He was always big for his age. Takes after Dad that way.”
Shelby spotted a wedding photo farther down the stairs and moved closer to get a better look. “What were your parents’ names?”
“David Wilde, Sr. and Mom was Meredith.”
The groom in the wedding picture looked shockingly like Greer—or, more accurately, Greer looked like him. “He was a senior?”
“Greer’s the junior. David Greer Wilde.”
“Oh. Never knew Greer goes by his middle name.” She went back to studying the picture. The senior David Greer Wilde was a hulk of a man, all hard lines, with coal-dark eyes that should have been intimidating as hell, but beamed nothing but joy and love as he held his bride in a permanent spin, her white dress flaring out around her.
Exactly how Shelby had pictured him from Reece’s stories.