"Come on." She pulled him into forward motion toward the entrance, not quite shaking him free of the images he'd just conjured of exactly how he was going to enjoy her that evening.
After graciously allowing him to pay for their admission, she escorted him with a purposeful stride past small furred creatures he didn't have time to catch the name of. They breezed by a tortoise, some large caged birds, and, thankfully, the petting zoo. Her pace began to slow as they passed the African Plains area.
They came to a stop before a double-gated enclosure labeled, "Deer Forest." She pulled out several coins and a small plastic bag from her purse and began filling the bag with corn kernels from a dispenser.
"For the right price, I bet they'd let us feed the lions," he suggested, seeing nothing tempting about her choice.
"I'm sure they would," she said, pushing the first of the two gates open and passing through the second without waiting to see if he followed her; which, of course, he did.
About ten feet inside the enclosure, she stopped walking and waited for him to join her. Her eyes held a bit of a dreamy expression as she pointed to the area around her. "This is one of my favorite places to come when I need to think."
Thinking was the last thing he wanted to do, but something about her love of these woods drew him in. They walked in union deeper into the park at a slow, comfortable pace.
She sat down on a wooden bench, slightly off the main path. He sat beside her, completely at a loss for why she had brought him there. Their earlier passion was put on pause. She didn't say anything at first, so nor did he. For a man who continually, almost compulsively, charged ahead, he was amazed by the comfort he found in their shared silence and inactivity.
Despite the fact that they were both fully dressed and separated by a few inches, he had never felt closer to a woman. That this feeling of intimacy could come before sex scared him. She was supposed to be a distraction; enjoyable but brief. She wasn't supposed to make him wonder how he was going return to his normal life without her and if returning there was what he really wanted to do at all.
In the shade of trees, he studied her content profile. Her makeup had begun to smudge. The hard work of her stylist was losing ground to her hair's natural curl. She sensed his scrutiny and peered back at him from beneath her naturally long eyelashes. He'd never seen anyone more beautiful, but wasn't the type of man to spout flowery words. He settled for laying his hand lightly over hers on the bench.
Their peace was broken by a wave of visitors who passed through the forest at a breakneck speed, obviously thinking like he had that this was the least impressive part of the zoo. After the intrusion, Dominic was uncomfortable just sitting there and mooning over Abby like a boy stricken with his first crush.
He said, "I don't see any deer. What are we doing here?"
"Waiting," she said. "The deer will come."
"Shouldn't you call them or something?" Dominic asked.
Her warm brown eyes crinkled with amusement as she smiled up at him. "They won't come if I call. That's what is amazing about this place. You can't force a deer to come to you. You can chase it, corner it, make all the threats you'd like, but a deer won't come until it wants to."
And then it dawned on him. "If this is your attempt at an analogy between my sister and these timid creatures, you obviously missed her claws."
Abby opened the bag of kernels and threw some on the ground around them. "I'm a good judge of people. Your sister was scared."
He scoffed at that. "Pissed is more like it. Don't think you know her from one brief meeting. She's not a little deer who is going to come running just because I toss some corn down."
"Why did you come back to Boston?"
Her question threw him. He'd come back because Thomas had implied that his sister's welfare depended on his presence at the reading. He'd thought that perhaps this time she'd see reason and finally take his offer of money; therefore escaping whatever web of control his father had spun.
Abby continued her cross examination. "You said you don't care about the money, so you came back for your sister."
This woman saw too much.
"A lot of good that did," he ground out. "Do these deer throw the corn right back in your face as my darling sister tosses any of my offers of assistance?"
Abby didn't seem put off by his anger. "Maybe you've never made her the right offer."
Ha, if only that were true. "I've repeatedly offered to help her financially. You heard her. She doesn't want anything from me."
"All I heard her say is that she didn't want your money."