He took his own sweet time pulling it back on. Sure enough, he had a black handprint on the front of the T-shirt, as if she’d grabbed his pec and given it a tight squeeze. He looked at it. His smile made her toes curl.
“You’d do anything to make me stop crying, right?” she accused.
“Nope. Tears don’t bother me,” he said. “It’s just that once I get a laugh, I have to follow up and try to get another one. I just can’t help myself. It’s, like, an obsessive-compulsive thing with me.”
“I don’t want to hear about your obsessions or compulsions, thank you. That’s way too much information for me.” She sniffed violently, mopped her face with her hand. “Sorry about your shirt.”
He petted the black mark tenderly with his hand. “I’m not,” he said. “I’m never washing this thing again. I think I’ll frame it.”
Her breath stopped. She stared over the edge of her hand. His eyes looked straight into her mind, sifting through thoughts, memories, fantasies. Drawing his own inscrutable conclusions. His lips curved, as if what he’d seen had given him license to take any liberties he liked.
“The thought of you using power tools is really arousing,” he said.
“I—I cannot believe you just said that to me,” she floundered.
“So put me in my place,” he said. “You’re Her Divine Highness, the Crown Princess of Endicott Falls. Who dares to mess with you?”
Who, indeed. She realized, after it was too late to stop, that she was licking her lips. “You never stay in any place that you’re put.”
He shrugged. “True enough. I can just see you, in my mind’s eye, looking sleek and powerful. Using a table saw. Dominating the hell out of it. Muscles flexing. Sweat dripping. Sawdust flying. Metal screaming.”
“Oh, you are so full of shit,” she said. “Just stop it, right now.”
“Scold me. Show me who’s boss.” His eyes glinted. “I go for that.”
She covered her face again. “You can stop jerking me around any time now,” she forced out, between helpless, hysterical giggles.
“Not yet. I drop to my knees and offer you a cold beer. You tilt the bottle back. A drop slides down, trembles on your collarbone, keeps on sliding. That’s when I fall on my face…and beg for mercy.”
She remembered that coaxing charm, that could get her to agree to anything he wanted. But in the end, he hadn’t wanted it. Or her.
She stepped back. She couldn’t slide into this honey-baited trap.
“So,” she said brightly. “How are your brothers these days?”
Sean’s eyes went blank as he switched gears from full-out seduction to bland pleasantries. His mouth twitched. “Uh, great,” he said. “Davy and Con are blissfully married. Con’s about to have a kid.”
“That’s fabulous. What about Kev? Is he blissfully married, too?”
His face hardened. A cold flash in his eyes sent a chill through her. “No,” he said. “You never heard about Kev?”
Her stomach dropped. “Heard? What should I have heard?”
Sean’s throat worked. “Kev’s dead. Ran his truck off a cliff.” He paused, eyes boring into hers. “You mean you never heard about that?”
She tried to speak several times before her vocal cords would respond. “No,” she whispered. “I left that same night. They put me on a plane for Boston. No one ever said anything to me about it.”
“Of course they didn’t,” he said. “Why would you ask?”
That hurt. It implied that she didn’t care, which was unfair.
But his eyes were haunted with old pain. How petty, to get huffy about semantics in the face of his loss. “I’m sorry. Kev was special.”
Sean silently inclined his head, accepting her words.
She gulped before asking the next question. “So, um, was it…”
“Suicide?” Sean jerked his chin. “So they say. Who knows?”
“And that stuff he told me? About the guys trying to kill him?”
Sean paused. “We never found any evidence that it was true.”
She took a moment to process that. “So it was…he was…”
“Yeah. Paranoid delusions. Persecution complex. Like our dad. That was the official conclusion, anyhow.”
The bitterness in his voice prompted her to ask. “And your own conclusion?”
“My own conclusion doesn’t count for shit. I keep it to myself.”
She could think of nothing to say. Or rather, she could think of many things, none of which were appropriate. Like grabbing him by the throat, yelling that he shouldn’t have gone through that without her.
Stupid bastard. Her throat tightened, like a fist.
“What the hell?” Blair was loping towards her, his face alarmed. “Liv! Are you OK? You look like you’ve been crying. Did he—”
“My eyes were watering,” she said hastily. “From the smoke.”
Blair handed her a handkerchief. When she came up for air, Sean and Blair were having a curiously hostile staring match.
“I’m surprised you have the nerve to show your face,” Blair said.
Sean’s eyebrows lifted. “I wanted to make sure Liv was OK.”
“Liv’s fine,” Blair said stiffly. “We’ve got her covered.”
“I’ll leave you in his capable hands, then,” Sean said to Liv. “Take it easy, princess.” He nodded politely at her, turned, and walked away.
Like a scene out of an old western. Broad-shouldered guy strides off into the sunset. Liv felt perversely abandoned as she stared at his retreating back.
Chapter 4
One foot in front of the other. Play it cool. Don’t look back.
Or he’d mash that lying piece-of-shit Madden’s nose into pulp. And then drag Liv off to a cave. He narrowly missed walking into a telephone pole. His mind was blank, hands shaking, stomach wonky.
Madden’s sticky, possessive vibe made him want to cave that arrogant prick’s head in with a rock. The shit-eating insect didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as Liv Endicott. Not that he himself did, either, but whatever. Fuck Blair Madden anyhow.
Wow. He thought he’d let that old anger go. After all, Blair’s amateur attempts to mess with him back in the old days had paled in significance compared to the real problems Sean had faced. That was the thing about the hammer blow of tragedy. It put the small stuff into perspective. And Madden was small. Like, scuttling cockroach small.
Keep it together. Impulse control. Actions have consequences.
The endless stern lectures from his father and brothers had clubbed into his head looped in his brain in a chaotic babble of mental noise.
Hey, he was trying. He’d controlled his impulses. Except for the impulse to come on to Liv. There were limits to a guy’s self-control. One lofty look from those big gray eyes turned him into a grunting caveman.
Maybe it was the sexpot cavewoman look that did it to him; the wild hair, the soot-smudged face, the notable absence of underwear.
The effect could only