LITMIR.BIZ

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haven’t had the chance to be. But that’s kind of the point of what I’m doing. Going out, maybe getting bitten in the ass.” Her cheeks turned bright red. “I can’t believe I said that.”

      “What?”

      “That word.”

      That made his stomach feel like it had been hollowed out. “Ass?”

      Her cheeks turned even redder. “Yes. I don’t say things like that.”

      “I guess not... Being the church secretary and all.”

      Now he just felt... Well, she made him feel rough and uncultured, dirty and hard and unbending as steel. Everything she was not. She was small, delicate and probably far too easy to break. Just like he’d imagined earlier, she was...set apart. Unspoiled. And here he had already spoiled her a little bit. She’d said ass, right there in his kitchen.

      And she’d looked shocked as hell by her own behavior.

      “You don’t have to say things like that if you don’t want to,” he said. “Not every experience is a good experience. You shouldn’t try things just to try them. Hell, if I’d had the choice of staying innocent of human nature, maybe I would have taken that route instead. Don’t ruin that nice vision of the world you have.”

      She frowned. “You know, everybody talks about going out and experiencing things...”

      “Sure. But when people say that, they want control over those experiences. Believe me, having the blinders ripped off is not necessarily the best thing.”

      She nodded slowly. “I guess I understand that. What kinds of experiences do you think are bad?”

      Immediately, he thought of about a hundred bad things he wanted to do to her. Most of them in bed, all of them naked. He sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth. “I don’t think we need to get into that.”

      “I’m curious.”

      “You know what they say about curiosity and the cat, right?”

      “But I’m not a cat.”

      “No,” he said, “you are Hayley, and you should be grateful for the things you’ve been spared. Maybe you should even go back to the church office.”

      “No,” she said, frowning. “I don’t want to. Maybe I don’t want to experience everything—I can see how you’re probably right about that. But I can’t just stay in one place, sheltered for the rest of my life. I have to figure out...who I am and what I want.”

      That made him laugh, because it was such a naive sentiment. He had never stood back and asked himself who the hell Jonathan Bear was, and what he wanted out of life. He hadn’t given a damn how he made his money as long as he made it.

      As far as he was concerned, dreams were for people with a lot of time on their hands. He had to do. Even as a kid, he couldn’t think, couldn’t wonder; he had to act.

      She might as well be speaking a foreign language. “You’ll have to tell me what that’s like.”

      “What?”

      “That quest to find yourself. Let me know if it’s any more effective than just living your life and seeing what happens.”

      “Okay, now you’ve made me feel silly.”

      He took another bite of dinner. Maybe he should back down, because he didn’t want her to quit. He would like to continue eating her food. And, frankly, he would like to keep looking at her.

      Just because he should back down didn’t mean he was going to.

      “There was no safety net in my life,” he said, not bothering to reassure her. “There never has been. I had to work my ass off from the moment I was old enough to get paid to do something. Hell, even before then. I would get what I could from the store, expired products, whatever, so we would have something to eat. That teaches you a lot about yourself. You don’t have to go looking. In those situations, you find out whether you’re a survivor or not. Turns out I am. And I’ve never really seen what more I needed to know.”

      “I don’t... I don’t have anything to say to that.”

      “Yeah,” he returned. “My life story is kind of a bummer.”

      “Not now,” she said softly. “You have all this. You have the business, you have this house.”

      “Yeah, I expect a man could find himself here. Well, unless he got lost because it was so big.” He smiled at her, but she didn’t look at all disarmed by the gesture. Instead, she looked thoughtful, and that made his stomach feel tight.

      He didn’t really do meaningful conversation. He especially didn’t do it with women.

      Yet here he was, telling this woman more about himself than he could remember telling anyone. Rebecca knew everything, of course. Well, as much as she’d observed while being a kid in that situation. They didn’t need to talk about it. It was just life. But other people... Well, he didn’t see the point in talking about the deficit he’d started with. He preferred people assume he’d sprung out of the ground powerful and successful. They took him more seriously.

      He’d had enough disadvantages, and he wouldn’t set himself up for any more.

      But there was something about Hayley—her openness, her honesty—that made him want to talk. That made him feel bad for being insincere. Because she was just so...so damn real.

      How would he have been if he’d had a softer existence? Maybe he wouldn’t be as hard. Maybe a different life would have meant not breaking a woman like this the moment he put his hands on her.

      It was moot. Because he hadn’t had a different life. And if he had, he probably wouldn’t have made half as much of himself.

      “You don’t have to feel bad for wanting more,” he said finally. “Just because other people don’t have it easy, doesn’t mean you don’t have your own kind of hard.”

      “It’s just difficult to decide what to do when other people’s expectations feel so much bigger than your own dreams.”

      “I know a little something about that. Only in my case, the expectations other people had for me were that I would end up dead of a drug overdose or in prison. So, all things considered, I figured I would blow past those expectations and give people something to talk about.”

      “I just want to travel.”

      “Is that it?”

      A smile played in the corner of her lips, and he found himself wondering what it might be like to taste that smile. “Okay. And see a famous landmark. Like the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben. And I want to dance.”

      “Have you never danced?”

      “No!” She looked almost comically horrified. “Where would I have danced?”

      “Well, your brother does own a bar. And there is line dancing.”

      “I can’t even go into Ace’s bar. My parents don’t go. We can go to the brewery. Because they serve more food there. And it’s not called a bar.”

      “That seems like some arbitrary shit.”

      Her cheeks colored, and he didn’t know if it was because he’d pointed out a flaw in her parents’ logic or because he had cursed. “Maybe. But I follow their lead. It’s important for us to keep away from the appearance of evil.”

      “Now, that I don’t know anything about. Because nobody cares much about my appearance.”

      She cleared her throat. “So,” she said. “Dancing.”

      Suddenly, an impulse stole over him, one he couldn’t quite understand or control. Before he knew it, he was pushing his chair back and standing up, extending his hand. “All right, Hayley Thompson, Paris has to wait awhile. But we

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