“Mia and Merry talking,” she muttered.
“Please don’t go back there,” he whispered.
He felt her eyes again on him, but she didn’t say anything.
“You’re here, and honest to fuck, it would pain me deeply, Cher, if you didn’t think I was where I needed to be with you to ask you to find that dress, put it on, and haul your ass into my truck to take a shot with me. I do not wanna go back to havin’ to prove it to you. What I do know with fuckin’ up another relationship is that you gotta lay yourself out from the start. Right now, that’s happening with Mia. You cannot hear it from someone else. And honestly?” It was a question, but he didn’t wait for her answer. “I want you with me when I do it. Not with me, sittin’ across from her. But with me so I can go to you after and lay on you what comes of that so I can let it go.”
Again, Cher didn’t speak.
He gave her time.
She said nothing.
“Am I back to provin’ shit to you?” he pushed.
“No.” Her voice was strange in a way he’d never heard from Cher. It was almost timid. “I’m here for you to lay it on me what comes of that, Merry.”
Thank fuck.
That took a lot for her. He knew it.
And he was glad for it.
So as he drove, he lifted her hand and brushed her knuckles with his lips, feeling her fingers curl around his almost too tight as he did it.
He dropped their hands back to his thigh, glanced at her, and said, “Thanks, brown eyes.”
“Don’t mention it,” she muttered.
He looked back to the road.
“Am I gonna have to take this bitch down?” she asked.
A Cher and Mia catfight.
Mia didn’t stand a chance.
He grinned at the road.
“No.”
“Things could get dicey in the dressing room of the strip club, gorgeous. All those bitches stealin’ eye shadow and boyfriends and shit. It got ugly. So if she keeps sendin’ you pictures and givin’ you crap and you need me to take her out, you just call. I’m there for you.”
“Good to know you got my back.”
She’d been teasing.
She was absolutely not teasing when she stated, “You got mine, you get that back. Always, Merry.”
He lifted her hand and kissed it again.
Her fingers didn’t curl too tight that time, but they still held on.
When he had her hand to his thigh, she asked, “Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“No high school girlfriend gonna come outta the woodwork that’s gotta be dealt with?”
“I didn’t have a high school girlfriend,” he told her.
“Oh,” she mumbled.
“I had seven.”
He heard her sigh before she kept mumbling, “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
He smiled at the road.
“Just to note,” she began, “you already know my boy is excited enough about us to send you text messages pretending to be me. But when I told Mom we were goin’ out, she did a grab-and-hold stupid girlie hop.”
Garrett started chuckling.
Cher kept talking.
“She called you the last good one standing.” She let that hang, then finished, “No pressure, though.”
He burst out laughing.
She squeezed his hand, then he smelled her perfume stronger before he sensed her closer, which was right before she touched her lips to the hinge of his jaw.
“Since we’re layin’ it out,” she whispered in his ear, “you should know, I love it when I make you laugh.”
He tightened his hand on the wheel as he felt a tightening in his crotch and the same in his chest.
“We’re too far from home now, honey,” he muttered. “Stop bein’ sweet and sit in your seat like a good girl.”
He felt her nose flick his ear before she did as told.
But she kept hold of his hand.
This was good since Garrett had no intention of letting her go.
* * * * *
Cher
I sat in Merry’s truck, the best steak I’d ever eaten settled warm in my stomach with the rest of the best food I’d ever eaten, not to mention three glasses of champagne.
And we were on our way to his place after the best date I’d ever had, bar none.
With the shit out of the way on the road to the restaurant, the rest was just Merry and me the way we’d always been.
Except super-charged.
We talked. We laughed. He teased. I teased.
But the added element of us being a new kind of us, a different kind of together, a together that involved sex, having had it and going to get it, made the teasing amazing.
It was like two hours of the best foreplay imaginable, having it over good food, nice champagne, in a crazy-awesome restaurant, wearing fancy clothes with other people around, and yet it was just me with a handsome guy.
The last good one standing.
Having it, I felt lucky.
Not like the lucky I felt when I’d met Dennis Lowe, who was pretending to be Alec Colton, insidiously slithering into my life in order to shake it to its foundations.
A genuine lucky where the goodness was right there, not just within reach because, most of the meal when we weren’t eating, Merry held my hand.
So I had a hold on it.
And it had a hold on me.
And all I had to do was not fuck things up and not let go.
“Nicest place I’ve ever been,” I murmured into the cab.
“What, Cherie?”
I turned my head and looked at him.
God.
Could that be mine?
“Never been to a place as nice as that,” I told him louder.