“Briefs. You already saw that.”
So she had. They’d been playing versions of this sort of question game for hours. With nothing to do but hang around camp and feed their fire, they’d started on safe topics…such as spring or fall. It had gone on for hours.
She should be bored. Miserable. Annoyed as hell that her hair was tangled and she had dirt under her fingernails and her butt was mostly on grass that hadn’t quite dried yet. But, looking up at the blanket of stars overhead, feeling the warm fire toasting their legs, and the warm press of Colt’s shoulder against her own and she felt…curiously anything but miserable. She was enjoying herself. And that was odd.
“You kinda fixated on clothing?” He nudged her with his shoulder.
Only the ones covering his ass. Beth Ann shrugged. “I’m not good at this game.”
“Nonsense,” he drawled. “My turn. Supergirl or Wonder Woman?”
“Wonder Woman.”
“How come?”
Beth Ann thought for a moment. “Because Wonder Woman doesn’t live in anyone’s shadow. Wonder Woman is her own woman. Supergirl is just Superman’s kid sister or something.”
“I don’t know that she’s Superman’s sister,” Colt said, twirling a blade of grass as he stared up at the sky. “Maybe his hot underage cousin or something.”
“You’re so into superheroes, then here’s your question. Batman or Superman?”
“Batman.”
“And why’s that?”
Colt grinned up at the stars. “Because Superman’s a reporter. Batman’s a millionaire playboy. He gets all the pu**y.”
She rolled her eyes and laughed. “Typical man answer.”
He grinned back over at her. “Cake or pie?”
“Cake,” she answered promptly. “Definitely cake.”
“Why definitely?”
“Because no one ever lets me eat it,” she said with a smile up at the stars.
She felt him shift, sit up. His shadow blotted out the stars and he leaned over her, and his dog tags swayed close to her face. “What do you mean, no one lets you eat it?”
Beth Ann glanced over at him, her gaze straying to that bare expanse of chest. He didn’t have a single hair on his chest. She liked that—neat, and clean, and allowed every muscle on his chest to show in blatant definition. She liked his tattoo, too. And the dog tags. Okay, she liked everything about him, which surprised her. “Oh, my parents were always very appearance conscious when I was growing up. Instead of a birthday cake, I got a fruit basket.” At his snort, she laughed. “It’s true. It wouldn’t look good for the mayor to have a butterball for a daughter.”
“Don’t see why it mattered,” he said in a low, angry rasp.
“It mattered very much to my parents. You’ve seen them about town. Have you ever seen a speck of dirt on my father’s car? Never.” Beth Ann supposed she should be annoyed with them, but their overbearing tendencies had been recently overshadowed by her newfound dislike for Allan. “They’re nothing compared to my ex.”
“Oh?” He lay back again, but still propped his head up on his bent arm, as if he wanted to watch her in the firelight.
The thought made her cheeks flush a little with excitement. “Allan always wanted me to look my best, of course. Anything other than a salad was greeted with ‘You’re going to eat all that?’ or ‘Will you be able to fit into your dress for the mixer on Friday?’ Allan very much wanted me to remain as thin and beautiful as I was in high school, in his eyes. Too many women let themselves go, he said, and he was determined to keep me looking just as perfect as I was then.” She gave a bitter laugh. “I told myself that when I broke up with him for the last time, I was going to eat an entire birthday cake in revenge.”
“And did you?”
She shook her head. “Nah. I think I was too upset to eat much of anything at the time, and by the time I remembered, it felt like I’d missed the point.”
“He was a controlling bastard, wasn’t he?”
This was getting uncomfortable. The last thing she wanted was a delicious, beautiful man leaning over her and talking about her ex. “Allan is Allan. He means well, but he has really high standards for everyone’s behavior but his own. It took me a while to realize that, and then when I did figure it out, I kept hoping he’d change. He didn’t, and I realized that I didn’t trust him anymore.” She looked over at him. “I’ve decided that I’m not having another relationship without trust.”
He grunted.
She couldn’t tell if that was agreement or disapproval, and felt the need to explain a bit more. “But no, I was oblivious to Allan’s true nature for a long time. Sometimes we just have blinders to how certain people are, because we want them to be how they are in our minds. Don’t you have anyone in your life like that? Your family?”
“Nope,” he said abruptly. “We’re not talking.”
She remembered his big clan of brothers on the edge of town, all living in a doublewide. She saw one of the Waggoners every now and then, but she didn’t run in the same circles as them. Most people didn’t. She remembered the father as a Nascar-shirt-wearing, tobacco-spitting junkyard owner. “Ah,” she said delicately.
His finger brushed her forehead, nudging aside a stray lock of her bangs. It sent a skitter of pleasure through her body. “If it makes you feel any better, I always thought Allan was a dick, even back in high school.”
She laughed at that, smiling up at him. The moment felt so intimate—she didn’t want to keep talking about Allan. “Let’s just say that I don’t regret our years together, but I also don’t regret breaking up with him.”
“Kinda thought I’d come back and see you still with him, and driving a minivan full of kids.”
She’d always viewed herself with that, too. Funny how life worked out. Beth Ann’s breath stopped for a moment as his finger brushed the lock of hair back to her hairline and lightly skimmed her brow. This was…incredibly sexy and intense all at once. And she felt like she had to make a little confession to him. “When I was with Allan, I was so focused on being the perfect girl—the perfect girlfriend, the perfect daughter, the perfect friend—that I didn’t realize that I wasn’t doing anything for myself. Allan didn’t want me to work, so I stayed home and made him lunches and kept the house clean. And I volunteered for book clubs and charities and ran fund-raisers because he liked that. And at some point, I realized, I stopped being me.” Her hand went to her heart, and her throat rasped just a little in remembrance. “I wasn’t Beth Ann anymore. Not to anyone. People didn’t see me as Beth Ann—they just saw me as that nice girl that Allan was going to someday make an honest woman out of. Not me. An extension of him. And it was partially my fault, because I’d been so focused on building him up in everyone’s eyes. All my hobbies were designed to make him look good.”