He also didn’t like smarmy men with gold chains staring at my br**sts and since I didn’t like that either, I thought it was very cool that he barked at the gross guy who was checking me out making that gross guy stop checking me out.

And he had a way with a compliment.

And last, he was a really, f**king good kisser.

The last part was the part where I wouldn’t go. Not yet. I knew I wanted to sleep with him. I knew that the minute I laid eyes on him. Hell, every woman who laid eyes on him knew that. I also knew I was a thirty-four year old woman who’d had one boyfriend and thus one lover in her life and he wasn’t very good at being the former and (not to speak ill of the dead), although I had no experience of another, he was hit and miss at the latter. I had since had a four year dry spell and my life decisions had led me into a fake marriage with an ex-con who contended he was wrongly imprisoned but wouldn’t elaborate. Furthermore, just the day before I’d decided to give up on men and it probably wasn’t the brightest move to go back on that decision after knowing the man for just over two days. I was thinking maybe I should play this smart and not jump into the sack and give him my “pussy”.

“You sort your shit today?” he asked and my eyes moved from the bouquet to him.

He was looking at me, my face, not the dress. This was disappointing because I really wanted to know if I’d done what he needed me to do but I wondered if it was like yesterday where he wasn’t going to give it away until he was ready.

About half an hour ago, I’d heard him come back while I was in the bathroom. He’d been gone all day but called twice. Once to say have lunch without him. The other to say have dinner without him. He did not tell me where he was or what he was doing. I also did not ask.

“Ella’s all over it,” I answered.

Ella, Ronnie’s mother was also kind of like my mother since she was really the only one I ever knew. She took me under her wing when I was thirteen and her daughter Bessie and I became best friends. Then she kept me there even after I hooked up with Ronnie and treasured me being there because Ronnie had slipped over the edge but she knew I was the only thing that kept him from freefall. That was, until he went into freefall.

When I explained things to her earlier that day, I skipped the ex-con slash picking him up from a correctional institute slash fake marriage bit and just told her I’d lied about going on vacation and was instead hooking up with a friend who was helping me move to Colorado. I’d explained the lie by saying I didn’t want anything to get back to Shift and, since Honey, Ella’s other daughter, was sweet as her name but not the brightest bulb in the box and had a connection with Shift that had more to do with history and missing her brother than brains, I didn’t want to take any chances.

Ella, birthing Honey and still living with her even though thirty years had passed since the blessed event, understood. She’d also been beside herself with glee. She had a key to my place and she was what I told Ty. All over it.

Then I’d called Margot at work. I’d given her the same story with the same omissions. She knew about Shift. She knew my dilemma. We’d often had conversations about how I could get out, move on, start a new life. She’d been worried about me for more than the four years I didn’t have Ronnie as a buffer, stretching that out to the eight I’d known her, in other words, when she started at Lowenstein’s. She wasn’t a big fan of Ronnie though she was a good enough friend not to mention it (too much) or give me her disapproving look (that often) or, when I’d bitch about him, she did not say “I told you so” with anything but her eyes and, last, she did not lose her mind and point out how stupid I was when I gave him another shot. Like me, she’d worked her way up from clerk and she wasn’t the head honcho of HR at Lowenstein’s but she was the assistant head honcho. She promised she was going to smooth the way.

And, incidentally, she was beside herself with glee too.

The truth was, all of this seemed pretty easy. So much so, I was feeling like a major idiot that I hadn’t tried it before.

Then again, I didn’t have a condo to move into, a huge, scary man to have my back and a nest egg of fifty K to fall back on before.

“Ella Ronnie’s Mom?” Ty asked and my attention focused on him again.

I nodded. “She’s already been to my place, started sorting and has called three moving companies to get quotes.”

He nodded once. Then he went to his suit jacket that was lying on the bed.

I walked across the room to my shoes while talking. “Work seems kosher too. My friend Margot, who works there, is going to explain things to the HR Director.” I sat down and slid my foot into a strappy, stiletto-heeled, silver sandal. Then, again, right out of my mouth popped more honest sharing. “Actually, this is all so easy, I’m kinda feeling like a moron that I didn’t do it before.”

“Shift hadn’t f**ked you this bad, you didn’t have anyone that scared his black ass shitless and you didn’t have fifty large to fall back on before.”

I tilted my head back and grinned at him. “Those are all the reasons I talked myself out of feeling like a total moron and into only feeling kinda like one.”

He stared at me for long moments. Then, without comment, he went to two money rolls he’d obviously at some point pulled out of the safe. One was a fifty roll. The other was a twenty.

My attention went back to my shoes. I was done around the time I heard the door open on the closet. I watched him drop the now less fat rolls back in the safe; he closed the door to it and the closet and turned to me.

“Ready?”

I stood and put my hands to my hips.

“I don’t know, am I?”

I meant I didn’t know what we were doing, where we were going and why I needed an outfit that would get attention and, not knowing any of that, I couldn’t know if I was ready.

But at my question his eyes travelled down the length of me to my toes and back again. They did this slow, taking their time, missing nothing and I felt their path like a touch on my skin. As they moved, I saw my dress in my head. Navy, clingy, silk jersey, pleated down the side seem creating diagonal gathers across the dress, one shoulder was bare, the other arm sleeveless. It hit me four inches above my knee, showed no cle**age but still tons of skin and it was so form-fitting it left very little to the imagination.

When his eyes locked on mine, he spoke and his voice was a very deep, low rumble, “Yeah. You are definitely ready.”