Page 38 of Falling for Brody

CHAPTER7

When they pulled awayfrom the curb in front of Bea's house, Rhea turned and waved out of the passenger window of the rig, "Bye, baby! Bye!"

Brody managed to keep his laughter under wraps. He didn't think it would help matters if she heard him.

He wasn't making fun of her. It was sweet, really.

It was just something that he'd get used to.

Brody looked at the crayon drawing that Chip had given his mother earlier when they'd started their egress from the house.

It was a smiling stick figure standing in front of a cottage house that looked very similar to the Hardy home.

He nodded at the picture that they'd taped to the dashboard. "He's a good artist."

She smiled at him. "Better than I am. You should have seen the drawings I made in biology when we were studying the digestive and circulatory systems. My teacher Mister Lee gave us the assignment of drawing both systems and labeling the different organs. I thought it was pretty good, but Mister Lee started calling me Picasso. He said I could make any image look like it was surreal."

Brody gave her a quick look before he turned back to the road. "Did you tell him that Picasso wasn't a surreal artist?"

She laughed and damn he loved the sound of it.

"Yeah, I kept that to myself. If I'd tried to tell him that Picasso's style was cubist and not surreal, he might have docked me some points."

She shifted in her seat beside him.

"Don't get me wrong. He was a great teacher. He just had this way about him where he knew everything and he wouldn't hear of anyone telling him he was wrong."

"Yeah?" He slowed down when Josie Anderson skipped across the street to her friend's house. "Like what?"

She tapped her fingers on the inner door of the rig. "Well, there was my friend Jaycee. The first day in class when he called roll for the first time, he looked at Jaycee, narrowed his eyes behind his glasses and announced that he'd taught her mother."

Brody continued to drive down the street toward the firehouse. "That's all?"

Rhea sighed and shook her head. "No. Jaycee did ask her mother about it and it turns out that her mother had gone to the same school that we did, and Mister Lee had been a teacher at that time, but he didn't teach Jaycee's mother. Her mom even had her old report cards with her teacher's name on it, but Mister Lee was never listened. He didn't believe that he was wrong."

Brody laughed softly.

"I wonder what it would be like to 'know' everything so certainly."

Rhea laughed. "That would be great, but I'm pretty sure I would find a way to doubt myself."

Brody reached out and touched her thigh before he could think better of it, and then he pulled it away, trying not to make a big deal about it. "Sorry."

She looked out the window and he couldn't tell from the reflection if she was smiling or not. "It's okay."

He hoped it was.

He had a feeling that reaching out to touch her wasn't going to be a one-time thing.

The night before, he'd touched her again and again.

She hadn't told him to stop.

Which probably shouldn't be the measure of whether or not he should do something, but...

"You know," he swallowed and tried to keep his voice light, "if you don't want me to... to touch you like that, you can always tell me to stop. I'm not... I'm not trying to make you feel uncomfortable."

She did turn to look at him as he turned into the firehouse lot and looked at him. When he pulled to a stop and set the rig in park he looked back at her.

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