Page 67 of The Au Pair Affair

He took in a breath and let it out. “Probably the time I broke the ice at both ends of my local pond and swam underneath from one end to the other. All in one breath. On a dare.”

Tallulah gaped up at his chin. “Okay, that isbone-chilling.”

“I know. Imagining Lissa doing something like that makes me break out in hives.” He was silent for a moment. “My mom compensated for my father’s absence in so many ways, but sometimes I think all the risks I took were to punish him for not being around. Which is ridiculous. He couldn’t have known what I was doing.”

A sympathetic spasm took place in her breast. “Not ridiculous. A way of expressing a need. Pain.” She rubbed his arm. “That can look so many different ways.”

“Yeah. Looking back, I wish I would have appreciated my mom more. How hard she tried to understand hockey. She even brought her book club to a game once. That effort was more than enough. I didn’t need anything else.”

Her throat squeezed. “Do you visit her? She must love Lissa.”

“Lissa is definitely more her speed. We get together at Christmas and they dork out.”

Tallulah’s throat muscles loosened with a laugh, her body starting to shake with mirth. “What does your mother think about your nickname?”

“She said the alliteration is pleasing.”

“Oh yeah. That’s definitely a creative writing instructor.”

“Through and through.”

Tallulah was quiet for a beat. “Does it bother you that you never met your father?”

Burgess rested his chin on her head and thought, briefly. “When I was younger, it did. Yeah. I had no one to watch hockey games with on television in my living room. I’d sit there silently, trying not to interrupt my mom’s reading.”

“Oh,that’swhere you learned to be the strong, silent type.”

“Maybe so. Is that how you’ve categorized me?”

“You don’t have a category,” she said tilting her head back to bat her eyelashes at him. “You need two of something to make a category and I doubt there’s more than one Burgess.”

See?

Flirtatious.

Or was she just being playful so he wouldn’t read too much into her words? They carried weight with him, either way. Everything she said and did carried weight. Just this morning, though, she’d told him she didn’t want anything serious. For now, he needed to let her feel free to say whatever she wanted to him, touch him however she wanted, without worrying hewas going to press the issue of a relationship. That would only cause her to back off and damn, he really didn’t want that.

Not when he was holding her in the moonlight, listening to her telling him he was one of a kind.

“There’s only one you, too,” he said, his right hand sliding down to her hip, massaging it in his hand and watching her lashes flutter. “Are you going to tell me what he said to you in the coffee shop?”

“I don’t think I should.”

Wires wound slowly around his jugular. “That bad?” he managed.

“Yes.”

Burgess was starting to breathe hard, using the hand on Tallulah’s hip to pull her closer, protecting her after the fact. Maybe he shouldn’t have stayed put in the booth after all. Maybe he should have gone over there and tossed the cretin through the plate glass window. “What did he say? I can handle it.”

Tallulah took a deep breath.

Oh God, this was going to be bad.

“He called you a Neanderthal,” Tallulah whispered, anger crackling in her voice. “I’d told one of our mutual friends I worked for you and he assumed correctly you were the man I was kissing outside of the club. And he called you... that.”

The hot magma that had been flowing in his veins, prepared to erupt over a vile insult toward Tallulah, cooled immediately. “Wait, that’s it?”

She spun around in his arms. “What do you mean, ‘that’s it’?”

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