Rowdy(26)

I’d tried to pull the answers out of Poppy the other day, but she was skittish and had blown past the topic like it didn’t matter. Something was going on with her. She told me she was busy and that she couldn’t talk and hung up on me after only a few minutes of conversation. That wasn’t like her and it amped my concern for her up ten notches.

I watched Rowdy carefully as he set the papers he had in his hand on the counter and walked around to the side I was on. He didn’t stop walking until he was right in front of me and I stiffened in an automatic response when he caged me in with an arm on either side of my hips. His head dipped down a little so that we were eye to eye, and I swore I could drown in that blue ocean of his gaze forever. His blond hair was lighter than normal without all the junk he usually put in it to style it up in that pompadour he wore, and the way it fell across his forehead made him look like that little boy who’d always made me so happy in those lost years. My fingers itched to reach up and push it away. They itched to touch him in any way he would allow.

He leaned a little closer to me and I felt his breath move the bloodred hair at my temple.

“I asked Poppy to marry me. I was eighteen, had the world at me feet, and was pretty much guaranteed a shot at playing pro football. I offered her everything and she told me she considered me her brother. She looked me dead in the eye and told me no matter what I did it would never be enough because your parents wouldn’t approve because they knew where I came from. That I wasn’t the right guy for her.”

I felt his chest expand and his breath hitch as dark blue clouds shadowed his hot stare. His lips touched my skin right next to my eyebrow and I was stunned my glasses didn’t fog up from the all heat he was generating. But while I was admittedly getting turned on, I also felt like everything inside of me where my heart and hope lived had turned into stone.

Rowdy asked Poppy to marry him? That was the first I had ever heard of that and I felt like it was life changing. They were both so young. I always assumed it was just puppy love but apparently his feelings for my little sister had been much more complex than I remembered or believed them to be.

“You asked her to marry you?” I wanted to shove him away from me. I really wanted to grab my sweet little puppy and run all the way to someplace where Rowdy St. James was lost back in my memories and I didn’t have this new information hammering away inside of me.

“I did. Poppy didn’t just say no, she took everything I thought I knew about love and ripped it apart from the inside out. The pieces of my heart were so tiny when she was done with me I didn’t bother to look for them. So no, Salem. I am not still in love with Poppy. She broke me and I haven’t bothered to try and love anyone since.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I put both of my hands on the center of his chest and shoved him away from me. I felt like I needed to escape, like his words were building a cage around all the grandiose ideas I had been following when I left Vegas.

“She never told me. We talked all the time back then, and not once did she tell me that you fucking asked her to marry her.”

I was watching the fantasy I had of showing him that there was so much more to us now that we were older disappear into smoke. I felt like he had just pulled a quarterback sneak and I was on the defense looking like an idiot while he ran the ball into the end zone. I never would have come here, never would have made myself at home if I had known just how barbed the ties were that held him anchored to the past.

I spun around to glare at him and to tell him to leave, but it got lost as I gasped in surprise because he had followed me and was once again all up in my personal space. He gripped my upper arms and hauled me up onto my toes.

“You started all of this, Salem. You don’t get to back away just because you don’t like what’s hiding in the dark once the light you’re shining hits it.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?” The words were whispered and I couldn’t look away from the burning blue of his aqua-colored gaze. Again my fingers twitched to get that blond lock of hair off of his forehead or maybe smack him across his handsome face.

“That part of the story is hers to tell.”

“That’s why you quit school, why you stopped playing ball? She turned you down and you ran away from it all?”

Slowly his head rocked back and forth in the negative and he pulled me up even closer so that our chests were pressed tightly together. Instantly I regretted not putting on a bra as the tips of each breast got excited being so close to all the hard heat of him. I let my hands curl tightly around the hard flex of his biceps.