Page 8
“So no one will bother you?”
“Oh, they’ll bother me. It just takes longer for them to want to.” Poet grins, a subtle, rueful twitch of his lips that suits his face.
I cannot tear my eyes from him, though I wonder if it really is the gin this time. The wooden platform is hard beneath me, but I feel soft in my bones and I stretch out enough to prop my head on my hand. “My grandfather has a farm back home. He grows wheat and rye. Potatoes when the soil is right.”
“Where is home?”
“Lithuania.”
“But you…live here?”
“Yes. For a long time now.”
“I don’t know anything about Lithuania.”
“No one here does. Most people think I am Polish. That I am a builder, no? Or a plumber.”
Poet’s grin widens, sharpening his cheekbones. “I can see your accent when you talk, but not what it is. You could say you’re French and I wouldn’t know any different.”
“You can’t lip read other languages?” I say this in passable French.
Poet frowns, but I don’t leave him hanging long. I repeat the question in English and he shakes his head. “I can only lip read words I knew before, unless I have them written down.”
“Before what—” I’m cut off by the buzz of my phone in my pocket. A buzz Poet feels too as we’re so close together. “I am sorry. It might be Aras.”
It isn’t. It’s Skylar telling me he wants to set off soon and drive my car through the night to Porth Luck, a journey that might put me to sleep thanks to the Whitlock gin in my system.
Poet can’t see my phone screen, if he’s even looking. But he reads me instead and cocks his head. “You’re leaving?”
“Soon,” I echo Skylar. “Is a long way home.”
Poet absorbs that without comment and I find myself studying him a little too hard as he stretches his arms over his head as though the night belongs to him. Muscles shifting, clean lines of skin that have me staring long enough that something inside me tips.
Weddings. Booze. The best and worst combination. Heat rises in me that feels the same as a tipsy summer night in Porth Luck five years ago. But it feels more and it makes no sense. Nothing does as we exchange loaded glances in the dark and I find myself so drawn to Poet I lean closer before I know what I’m doing.
Before I understand it.
Too close.
I pull back. Cover it by shifting upright, moving for the ladder. “I have to go. My friend wants to leave.”
Again, I’m not looking at Poet when I speak.
Again, he reads me and fills the space behind me on the narrow platform. “Be careful on the third rung down.”
My spine tingles and it’s not from the drop. I grip the ladder and lever my body around to set my feet beyond the rung he’s warned me about. Start down, the wood rough under my hands. Dry wood, not sea damp and salt worn. He’s of the earth. As Sol would say the moment he lay eyes on Poet Whitlock.
I reach the ground. Steady my feet, step clear, and glance up in time to watch him come down.
Nu, velnias…well, damn. He barely touches the ladder. Slides down like he owns it, and it’s…
Attractive.
I can’t find any other word for it. The competence in every lithe flex of Poet’s masculine body and how he entrances my gin-buzzed brain.
He drops the last step and we’re close again. Because I’ve failed to move out of the space he needs to set his feet on the ground. Not quite touching this time, but it wouldn’t take much, and the tingle in my spine, the slow burn of anticipation, it spreads—to my hands, my chest.
My mouth.
