Page 33 of Single Girl in the City
“I’ll have you know I’m a card shark.”
Not today she wasn’t. Today she was fragile and expressive, every emotion flashing through her eyes.
His voice dipped low. “Is someone hurting you?”
She looked up, surprise in her eyes. He’d noticed the bruise on her side when she’d reached for a new box of stir sticks last week at the tea shop. Then there was her wrist and the way she held herself as if it hurt to be upright for too long. “It’s not what you think.”
“Then can you tell me what it is before this image of what I think happened makes me hunt down whoever hurt you.” He ran the pad of his finger over the bruise that disappeared beneath her brace.
“I’m a kindergarten teacher. Or I was.”
That explained a lot. Wiseass notwithstanding, she had this uncanny ability to nurture just about anyone, including him. He could picture her corralling a class of pint-sized people with her patience and gentle hand—and it made him smile. The way she spoke of it in the past tense and the sadness there made him want to pull her into his arms again.
“I read that in your résumé.” An impressive résumé. The best he’d seen all day. But stellar applicant or not, it wasn’t happening. “Tell me what wasn’t there.”
“Three months ago, I was in an accident. A bus accident,” she began, her voice threadbare, her eyes on the floor. “We were going to the museum for a field trip and some guy decided to down some whiskey, then get behind the wheel. He T-boned the bus. We went off the road and flipped over.”
“Jesus,” he whispered. It explained her fear of anything with more than two wheels and why she startled at even the slightest of noises. “How badly were you hurt?” Bad enough that she was still bruised three months later.
She met his gaze and new tears swam in her eyes. “I lived.”
Which meant others had not. He didn’t even want to know what her world must have looked like in that moment or how one even came back from that kind of event. He wondered if that’s what her sexy Samaritan act was all about. Her way of finding balance in a world that had run right over her.
Needing to be closer, he sat next to her on the couch and held her hand between his. “You’re shaking.”
She looked at him strangely. “That’s you.”
Jesus, it was him and he had no idea why. But she was looking at him as if she’d never really seen him before and he was seeing a side of Abi that he’d spent the past few weeks trying to uncover. Soft and open, she was letting him in, even if just a tiny bit.
“Thank you for not judging me,” she whispered, as if someone else had. “But I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I talk when I get upset, but when I talk, I get more upset.”
He’d let it go—for now. Until then, he was going to have to earn her trust. If she didn’t want to talk about the accident, then he’d get to know her another way. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“You mean your terrible interview skills?”
He laughed, and it must have been contagious because the corner of her eyes crinkled a smidge. “We already went over that and they aren’t that bad.”
“First off, the man-bun guy. Women come to bars to look for a sexy face. Man buns aren’t sexy.”
“Is that why you come into the bar? Sexy guys? Maybe sexy guys with tattoos?” The way her face flushed told him all he needed to know. And that fun fact piqued his curiosity even more.
“I come for the burgers.”
“Uh huh.”
“Then there’s the mafia dropout–looking guy who didn’t know the difference between an IPA and a hefeweizen. And Miss Phi Pi can’t even make a cosmo without checking her phone for the recipe.”
“She can learn.”
“Ten to one, she chokes on the first game night,” Abi said with that smart-ass tone that told him she was back on her game.
“And what about the blonde?”
“Her double Ds are going to get between her and the bar top. How will she ever reach the tap?”
She sat back and crossed her legs, that black skirt riding up her thigh just enough to give him a glimpse of those toned legs. And her sexy as hell bright red cowgirl boots. Man, the second she’d walked into the bar he couldn’t look away. Oh, he hadn’t let on that he saw her, but it was as if his body recognized hers from across the space.
“You jealous, Angel?”
