Rowdy(18)

“Hey.”

His eyes flared hot at the center and I saw the corners of his mouth tense in a frown as he continued to just stare at me without speaking.

It took a solid five minutes before he decided to open his mouth. “Nash called me and told me to swing by and see if you were still here. He wants me to talk to you about the store.”

I lifted an eyebrow at him and took a step back. When I did so he took a minute to breathe the space in and run his thumb along the edge of one of his ruthlessly trimmed sideburns. His eyes also swept over me and landed back on my face with his frown still in place.

“Why are you such a mess?”

I snorted and flipped my tangled hair over my shoulder. “I got caught in the rain on my lunch break and almost ran some poor woman over in my haste to get back to work. I can’t believe no one told me I looked like a drowned rat all day.” I rolled my eyes and went to move another step or two back from him but he caught my wrist in his hand and tugged me closer.

My lungs stopped working and my heart fell out of my chest and landed at his feet when he took his free hand and ran his thumb along the delicate curve below one of my eyes where all my eyeliner had retreated to.

“This actually looks familiar. I remember the first time you snuck makeup from one of your girlfriends at school and couldn’t get it off.” He repeated the process on the other eye and I had to suck in a breath out of desperation because his face was starting to get blurry from lack of oxygen to my brain. “You didn’t know the stuff was waterproof and spent an hour trying to scrub it off with the hose in the backyard because you knew your dad would lose his shit if he caught you with it on. You just ended up looking like a soggy raccoon.”

I remembered the incident just as clearly as he seemed to, only I was having a hard time thinking straight because his thumb was now dancing across the high arch of my cheekbone and skipped even lower to glance across the ruby I wore right above my lip.

“You ran home and asked Maria what to do. She sent you back with olive oil and saved the day.” I gave him a lopsided grin. “It wasn’t too long after that that I started wearing as much makeup as I could cake on my face just to get under his skin. Some habits stuck with me, I guess.”

I saw his chest shudder as he took a deep breath and something dark moved across his sky-blue eyes. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something else then changed his mind and snapped it closed. He dropped my wrist like it was on fire and took a step back from me. I didn’t bother to try and hide the disappointment that his retreat caused.

“So talk to me about the store.”

I sighed a little, but if he wanted to talk business I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. At least he was carrying on a conversation with me.

I ran over the basic ideas I had given Nash earlier. I told him that I really thought their clients would love the opportunity to represent not only the shop but their favorite artists and I was happy that he seemed to agree. He told me his idea about offering prints and graphic pieces of art to sell as well as apparel and I had to admit I was impressed with his entrepreneurial mind. He had always been a lot more than a pretty face and a jock. I was happy to see he hadn’t lost that as he had grown into adulthood.

We tossed ideas back and forth for twenty minutes or so and I told him he was in charge of wrangling Rule and Nash because he knew them better than I did in order to get them to give me designs I could use. He readily agreed and then we fell into an awkward silence as it was obviously time to go. He told me he would have something for me by the end of the following week and I nodded in agreement. We turned in different directions, him toward the stairs and me back toward the light switch on the wall, when he suddenly said my name in a very strangled tone.

“Salem . . .”

I looked at him over my shoulder and lifted a brow at the intent look on his handsome face.

“Yeah?”

His boots clattered on the wooden floor as he stalked toward me. His mouth was in a tight line and his eyes were bleeding blue fire at me.

“What is that?”

He walked right up to me. He didn’t stop until his chest was almost pressed into my back. For someone who had actively avoided me for weeks and weeks and didn’t seem thrilled to have to share the same space as me, he sure didn’t have any kind of problem at all putting his hands on me.

He collected my heavy fall of two-tone hair in his hands and pulled it all up and off the bare expanse of my shoulders and neck.

From one shoulder to the other I had a field of Texas bluebonnets and in between all the flowers were tiny little sparrows. It was a big tattoo, bright and pretty, that took up a lot of real estate on my skin and in my heart. The flowers and birds were so lifelike it looked like a photograph not a painting made of flesh and ink. It was the first tattoo I had ever had done and it had withstood the test of time pretty well over the years. Normally it was hidden by my hair or whatever I was wearing for the day, but with this shirt, the entire thing was on display and it was no wonder he was looking at the ink like it was going to jump off my skin and wrap him in memories.