Animal Magnetism

Twenty-One

L ilah took Brady to the lake, his earlier words echoing in her head.

You’re awfully closemouthed about your hopes and dreams.

You let me into your body but not into your head.

I’m just trying to get to know you better.

The night was balmy, with a nearly full moon, and aware as she had been all week that her time with him was winding down, she took his hand, wanting to lose herself in him, wanting to feel connected.

They walked to the water’s edge, sitting there, absorbing the night. The soft breeze rustling the hundred-foot pines. The distant cry of something looking for its mate. The water lapping near their feet.

He was right, she had held back. Big-time. She’d done so out of self-preservation, but that didn’t make it okay. If she was going to have no regrets, she needed to be fearless. Because no way was she going to be the woman who couldn’t-or wouldn’t-let herself love.

She pulled the bottle of whiskey out of the bag and made him laugh softly. God, she loved making him laugh. He didn’t do it often, but when he did it was a beautiful sound.

She went back into the bag for her second item-a deck of cards.

“Strip poker?” he asked hopefully.

She showed him that they weren’t regular playing cards but the game Uno. “It’s all they had.” She shuffled and dealt, then took a swig of the whiskey and offered the bottle to Brady.

Eyes on hers, he tossed back a swallow, then smiled because she was still coughing. “So, you do this a lot,” he said.

She laughed and picked up her cards. They played a round and she lost. She set down the cards.

“Strip Uno?” he asked this time, still hopeful.

When she smiled, Brady knew he wasn’t going to get to see her strip.

“Something not quite as fun as stripping,” she said. “But I hope you’ll like it.” She hesitated. “I’m going to tell you something about me.”

He was surprised by this.

Lit by the glow of the moon playing off the water, she smiled at his expression. “I know, brace yourself. Are you ready?”

“Hit me,” he said.

“I grew up out here.”

“I already knew that.” He eyed her sundress, knowing she wore only a pair of skimpy, mind-blowing panties beneath-which meant that he could have had her naked in two rounds of Strip Uno.

“Yes, but you didn’t know that I grew up poor as dirt.”

He stopped thinking about Strip Uno and met her gaze. “I guessed.”

She nodded. “Of course at the time, I had no idea we were that bad off,” she said. “My grandma never let on. She took on odds jobs like cleaning houses and sewing, taking me with her so I wouldn’t be alone. She’d pretend we were going on a grand adventure, and I believed her until in second grade, when John Dayley told me I was poor white trash.”

Brady’s chest tightened, for her grandma, for the little girl she’d been.

Laughing a little, she shook her head. “I didn’t even know what white trash meant,” she said, not nearly as bothered as he. “When I got home, I asked my grandma and she said it meant that we were special. The next weekend she took me to the circus. One of her cleaning clients had left her the tickets. It was”-she closed her eyes and smiled in fond memory-“amazing. I wanted to be a circus ring leader. I wanted to grow up and have all those animals around me, and I wanted to take care of them.” She paused, glancing at him to make sure he wasn’t going to laugh.

But that ache in his chest had spread now, and he didn’t feel much like laughing.

“It was my first personal goal for myself,” she said quietly, hitting him with those mossy green depths that he could jump into and never come up for air.

He smiled past a tight throat. “I like it.”

They took another shot of whiskey each and played a second round. He lost, but only because he forgot to say Uno. Lilah looked at him expectantly.

“I’d rather strip,” he said.

“Don’t tempt me. Talk. Tell me something about you. Something about when you were young.”

He found it far easier than he could have imagined, which was no doubt thanks to the whiskey. “I was a punk-ass teenager when I landed at Sol’s, and pissed off at the world.” God, so pissed off. Even now he could remember the anger burning through him at every turn. “I’d just gone through a few different foster homes, each nicer than the last, and for various reasons, I didn’t get to stay at any of them.”

And he’d wanted to. Stay. He’d wanted a place where he belonged to someone.

“Why couldn’t you stay?” she asked.

He shrugged, able to once again feel that bone-deep helplessness at not being in charge of his own fate. He’d been through some hairy shit in his life, especially in the army rangers, where too many times to count death had been a certainty, and yet nothing had been worse than that helplessness he could still practically taste. “The first couple that took me in ended up getting pregnant, and she got too sick to care for a kid, even a nearly grown one.”

“Oh, Brady,” she said softly.

“The second family had four daughters of their own already. They’d requested a girl, and when one came along, they traded me in.”

“What?” She straightened, eyes blazing. “You weren’t a used car!” she said in outrage, making him smile and reach for her hand.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“No, nothing about that was okay.” She took a deep breath, clearly fighting for control. “What about the third family? And if you tell me that they traded you in, too, I’m going to go hunt them down myself.”

“They got transferred out of state and didn’t want to go through the paperwork to keep me. So I got dumped on Sol. By then my biggest goal was to get the hell out. I was done.”

“Well, no wonder!”

Because she was a little drunk and a whole lot adorable in her righteous anger for him, he pulled her close to his side and nuzzled his face into her hair. “At that point, I had no particular destination in mind. I just wanted to be free, to go.”

“So what happened?”

“Sol happened. He wasn’t much on patience, but he knew enough about how a teenage boy’s head worked. He put me on a horse and pointed me in the direction of more than seventy-five thousand acres of wild land to explore.”

“Goal accomplished?” she asked softly. “You felt free?”

“Goal accomplished.”

Again they took a shot, and Brady was glad they were within walking distance of her place.

They played another round.

Lilah lost. “By the time I got to high school,” she said, knocking back more whiskey, “I had a good idea of what poor white trash was and I didn’t like it. I’d never left Idaho, not once in my entire life. Can you imagine?” She shook her head in amusement at herself.

The moonlight touched over her hair, her face. Brady thought he’d never seen anyone more beautiful.

“All my life,” she went on, “all I wanted was to go see the world. I mean I love the people here, love my life, but I wanted to see what was out there. College was my ticket out. I got a full ride at UNLV, and off I went.”

She’d been a girl from the wilds of Idaho who’d never seen a big city much less left those wilds. He could only imagine how different Vegas must have seemed to her. “What did you think of the place?”

She laughed a little. “Culture shock. But it was a free ride, at least at first.” She shook her head. “And it was a goal accomplished for me as well, and I never took that lightly. Ever.”

He nodded. He understood perfectly.

“My grandma was so proud,” she said softly, wrapping her arms around her knees, staring out at the water reflectively, remembering. “Everyone was. And I knew I had to do it-I had to succeed. But then my second year happened. My grandma got sick and I was coming back and forth, and my grades dropped. Because of that some of my funding fell through, and I had to take a couple of jobs to make ends meet.”

His heart stopped. “Is this the part where you tell me you were forced to dance or strip for tuition? Because if so, I’m going to kick Dell’s and Adam’s asses and enjoy it.”

“No, I didn’t become good friends with them until after college.” She laughed. “But sweet offer, thanks. I’ll shelve that for the next time either of them pisses me off. I worked at night waiting tables at a club. It was fun but hard work, and I took on more hours than I should have. I fell even more behind and needed help. So the TA of my microbiology class offered to tutor me. Tyler-” She broke off, both the words and the eye contact, and dropped her head to her knees. “I fell for him a little bit.”

He couldn’t quite read her tone now and for the first time felt unsure as to her feelings since her face was hidden. “Is he still in your orbit like everyone else?”

She shook her head, her entire body tense. Clearly, this had not been a lighthearted fun relationship. He slid his hands to her shoulders, which were knotted tight. He worked at them silently, tugging a low moan from her before she straightened. “I fell in love with him. With Tyler. And he…”

Her sudden silence had his heart stopping again, because he could read her quite clearly now. He wasn’t going to like this story.

“I thought he loved me back,” she said very softly. “But… it turned out that he had this whole other life he’d hidden from me. He was a dealer on campus. Which sounded so crazy to me when I found out-he wasn’t a guy you’d ever think was dealing drugs. He didn’t do them himself, he was clean cut and well liked, but…” She shook her head. “One day he got wind of a police search at his frat house, and he got stupid.”

“How stupid?”

“He panicked and planted all his stuff in my dorm room. He had to save his stash,” she said. “Screw me, right?”

Brady drew a long, slow breath. “What happened, Lilah?”

“They couldn’t find what they wanted at his place, so they thought they’d check with the girlfriend. The stupid, naïve girlfriend. I was arrested.” She drew a shaky breath while Brady worked through the rage churning through him for what had happened to her.

“Everything eventually got cleared up,” she said. “But the damage was done. I’d missed so much class time that I couldn’t make it up, and even if I could have done so, I couldn’t possibly have focused while working at clearing my name.”

“Tyler,” Brady said past a very tight jaw. “What happened to that asshole?”

“He got off on a technicality, something to do with the way the search had been conducted. He ended up skipping town without so much as a sorry or good-bye.”

Since she was facing away from him, he couldn’t see her expression. Which meant she couldn’t see his, and that was a good thing. He knew she was used to keeping the people in her life close, developing real, deep, lasting relationships that stuck. It was a comfort to her and made her feel like she had a full family at all times. This, he was certain, had completely devastated her on all levels. “Tell me you taught him a lesson involving your boot and his nuts before he left.”

“I thought about it, but no.” She paused. “I tried to shake it off, tried to go on and not think about it, but… well, I guess I got a little depressed.”

He pulled her into his lap and hugged her. “I’m sorry.”

“In the end, what happened with Tyler didn’t matter. I was too busy dealing with my grandma. I came back here to take care of her.”

Which is how she’d ended up not finishing school at all, he realized. “Was there no one else?” he asked. “No one to help you?”

“No one really knew how bad it was. And it didn’t matter because shortly after that, I was too busy to worry about it because the doctors wanted me to put my grandma in a nursing home. I… couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it to her. She was so independent all her life, so feisty and strong… I just couldn’t.” She paused, pressing her face into his throat. He tightened his grip on her and she burrowed in like she’d been made for him.

“When she died,” she said very softly, “I should have gone back to Vegas, but I couldn’t even think about it. The joy of it was gone for me. I didn’t want to leave Sunshine anymore. I felt like a failure.”

Given how hard she worked at getting her degree at night, and how equally hard she’d hid it from everyone, she still did. “You have nothing to be ashamed of, Lilah.”

“Are you kidding? I fell for the oldest trick in the book-the TA seduction. And the arrest and all that-I was so stupid.”

“Not stupid,” he said quietly, with rage seething through him for what had happened to her.

“Naïve then,” she said. “I wasn’t ready for the hurt. It surprised me and turned me off on the whole relationship thing.”

“What about Nick and Cruz and Ian?”

She shrugged. “Nick’s a good guy, but he’s got weird feet.”

Brady arched a brow. “Weird feet?”

“And he’s allergic to dogs and cats.”

He nodded. “And Cruz?”

“Hates junk food.”

“And Ian?”

“I never got to see his feet.”

Brady fought the urge to remove his boots and ask her if he had weird feet. “So you’ve been using excuses on why not to have a relationship. Got it. But why me?”

“Well, for starters, you’re not allergic to animals.” She smiled and kissed him. “That’s a point for you.”

“And I like junk food.” Another point.

“Yeah, that was a biggie.” Her smile faded as she got serious. “But mostly it’s because you were a complete stranger, someone new, someone who didn’t know me, someone who maybe in the end wouldn’t hurt me because I’d keep it light.” She smiled again but minus her usual wattage. “I was wrong about that, by the way.”

She was so strong and fierce and loyal and sweet and even though she’d made it perfectly clear all along that she didn’t want to keep him, that he was held in her heart but not owned, he’d let her inside him. So who was the stupid one here? Him.

Because even if she changed her mind about wanting a future, there was no future to be had. He was leaving. In a few days, as a matter of fact. Trying not to let the pain of that show, he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and traced his finger down her soft cheek. “Lilah-”

“I don’t know if you know the rules of Uno,” she said, extricating herself from his lap and standing up. “But if you lose twice, there’s a penalty.” She looked down at him, eyes shiny but smiling.

She was trying to lighten the mood, and he was game. “What kind of penalty?”

She tugged on the halter tie of her dress and it slipped over her breasts, then her hips, and dropped to the ground, pooling at her feet, leaving her in nothing but those very tiny black panties.

“God bless the penalty,” he whispered reverently.

She hooked her thumbs in the strings at her hips and let those fall as well.

Brady tried to say something but found he couldn’t speak because his tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth. He couldn’t breathe either. “You are so beautiful, Lilah.”

She smiled, and he felt a helpless one curve his mouth as well. “Come here,” he said.

Shaking her head, she turned away, giving him a heart-stopping view from the back as she took a few running steps and then a very neat dive into the water, vanishing beneath the surface.