“Jer?”
He turned toward her. “Did you always know who you were inside?”
Talk about a rapid swerve in conversation…and paid with what he’d said a few moments before…
Well, this was getting to be a lot more complicated than she’d first thought—this wasn’t big, broody alpha meets woman and goes caveman.
This was…shadows in his eyes and a hint of hurt and—
This wasn’t the Jeremy she knew.
“Jer,” she whispered, reaching out a hand, intending to grab his, to soothe some of that hurt, but he didn’t move, didn’t allow her fingers to wrap around his.
He just nodded slightly. “The light is green.”
She pulled back, pressed her foot down on the gas pedal, and she drove.
“No,” she whispered after a moment, slanting a glance in his direction. “Hell, half the time, even now, I don’t know what’s going through my mind.”
Silence.
Then, “Really?”
“Yeah,” she whispered, “and I think that’s why I reacted so poorly to”—one hand off the steering wheel, gesturing between them—“I was reeling.”
About what she was feeling andshouldbe feeling and what that kiss had done to her soul.
Because with one touch of his lips, he’d made her feel more than Sam had.
Because that undid everything.
Because she had a hole inside her, and she didn’t want to fill it with another person,couldn’trisk doing that and losing what she was. She wanted—no, shehad—to fill it herself.
“I’m sorry for that,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have acted like that.”
“I was the one who was out of line. I thought…”
She waited as he trailed off, as he paused again.
“Well, I thought a lot of things.” He shot her a smile. “Clearly, I’m wrong.”
That was…heavy. That stung her, mostly because she could feel thathewas hurting, that part of it was her fault. So, searching for a way to lighten the conversation, she said, “Happens to the best of us.”
A rough chuckle. “I guess it does.”
“So,” she asked, continuing along that vein. “You really think Rafe arranged this?”
“Of course, he did.”
“Even Rafe doesn’t have the power to summon Jenkins’s complaining phone calls.”
Jeremy glanced over, lifted a brow.
She paused, realized that he could have easily set a call with Jenkins, knowing that Jer was coming for lunch, that she wouldn’t turn down Luciano’s. “Damn interfering man,” she muttered.
Another chuckle, this one less rough. “We do that.”
Sighing, she turned into the parking lot. “And you think he wants peace?”