Riveted. Jay Crownover

not to freak out that this was essentially him telling me good-bye. I’d never had him, but I was far from ready to let him go.

      “When are you leaving?” My voice cracked and I didn’t bother to hide how deeply his words were affecting me. When you fell you eventually had to land but nobody warned me that part hurt like a bitch.

      He stopped moving and put his hands on his hips. It was his turn to incline his head at me while he watched me unwaveringly. “I’m leaving this afternoon.”

      I lost my grip on the coffee mug. The heavy ceramic fell out of my suddenly numb hands and hit the kitchen floor with a shattering impact. I didn’t even hear Church call my name as hot liquid splashed up on my bare legs. I was frozen, stuck in place as every fantasy I’d built around the man that was rushing towards me, demanding to know if I was okay, imploded inwards. Dying dreams ripped at my heart as blood rushed through my ears in a waterfall of what could be. If only he knew the way I knew.

      I gasped so hard that it made my lungs hurt when hard hands landed on my shoulders and gave me a little shake. Before I could tell him that I was fine I found myself swept up in a single fluid motion. I was clasped to a rock-hard chest as arms that felt like boulders held me aloft. His boots crunched across the broken pieces of mug on the floor as he demanded directions to the bathroom so he could make sure my naked lower half was okay.

      I’d wanted his hands on me for what felt like an eternity and when I finally got them there he was getting ready to take them away forever. This wasn’t enough of his touch. This wasn’t even close to being the way I wanted to be held and handled by him but if he was going then I would soak it up like a sponge and savor every fleeting second of it.

      He didn’t put me down until he found the bathroom, on his own since I was mute and immobile. He set me down on the edge of the vanity and crouched down in front of me. I’d had a lot of really X-rated fantasies about him being in that exact position. In them I wasn’t wearing a shirt with a taco on it, sporting morning breath and rocking hair that looked like a strawberry blond rat’s nest. I also had on underwear that was far sexier than the plain, cotton boy shorts I was pretty sure Church currently had a clear view of, but none of that mattered because he was using the edge of a towel he’d torn from the rod behind him to gently rub the spots on my shins that were turning an angry shade of red.

      “You might blister.” The Delta was thick in his voice as he looked up at me. His accent never seemed to change, it was always languid and syrupy thick with the south in it, but while he knelt in front of me, eyes hooded and concern for my well-being stamped all over his beautiful face, it was stronger, more pronounced. Always there making sure I was okay, for all the wrong reasons. I never asked to be his duty. My heart twisted painfully as I struggled to pull it together.

      “It’ll be fine. I’m pale, so it always looks worse than it is. I need to go clean up the mess before Wheeler brings Dolly back. Her food and water is in the kitchen and I don’t want her in there until it’s safe.” We’d never been this close before. Normally my want for him prickled under my skin, annoying but manageable. This close, his hands brushing across my tender skin made longing burn along every nerve and my blood come alive with hunger that was throbbing heavy and hard in every single part of me that was female.

      He grunted at me and rose to his feet, which immediately made the bathroom infinitely too small for both of us. He shifted to reach the shower and cranked it on. After dousing the towel in cold water and dropping it back on my legs, he leaned back against the wall and resumed his favorite pose with his arms across his chest. I tried not to ogle the way the fabric of his plain black T-shirt strained around the circumference of his biceps and failed. He was effortlessly a whole lot of eye candy and there was no denying I had one hell of a sweet tooth.

      “I’ll clean the mess up but, Dixie, I gotta ask you … Will you come to Mississippi with me for a few days?”

      He asked it so casually that I swore I misheard him. “What?” I lifted my fingers to my ears and gave each one a poke and a tug. “I must’ve heard you wrong. It sounded like you just asked me to go to Mississippi with you.”

      One of his eyebrows lifted and the corners of his mouth twitched. It wasn’t a smile, but it was the closest thing to one I had ever seen on his handsome face.

      “I did ask you to go to Mississippi with me. It’s a long story, and if you agree I promise to tell you all the important parts of it.” I stared at him in stunned silence for a long moment feeling like I’d been dropped in an alternate universe. There wasn’t much between us aside from that friendship I forced on him, so this favor seemed way out of the boundaries he had established and way out of character for the man that made it known he rode that Harley of his solo.

      “I need more than that, Church. You can’t really expect to ask me something like that and want an answer with no explanation.” Everything inside of me was surging and rushing, trying to catch up with this new, unexpected turn of events.

      He heaved a sigh that lifted and dropped his thickly muscled chest. “When my family asked me to come home, instead of telling them I needed time, that I wasn’t ready to face them and the real world yet, I told them I was hanging out in Denver because I met a girl. I thought it would get them off my back, and it did … sort of.”

      I sucked in a breath and shifted my legs under the now clammy and cool towel. “You lied to your family?” I didn’t like that one bit.

      “I’ve been lying to them for years. When they wanted to know where I was, what I was doing … I lied. Every time they asked if I was safe and I told them things were fine, it was a lie. This was just one more lie that I told so they didn’t have to worry about me. I wasn’t ready to go back, now I am, but I need you to go with me. There’s an eighty-year-old woman that’s counting on me to come through for her and I need you to make that happen.” He said it all so point-blank and matter-of-factly that I was convinced maybe I was dreaming the whole thing. Maybe I was still wrapped up in bed with Dolly snoring next to me. Maybe my last date had been bad enough that I’d officially gone off the deep end.

      I reached out and grabbed the taut skin above the top of his jeans. There wasn’t any fat there to trap between my fingers but I still managed to get a solid pinch in. Church swatted my hand away and took a step towards the door. “What in the hell was that for?” He rubbed the spot through his T-shirt and glared at me.

      “Well, clearly I’ve stumbled into a terrible romantic comedy and Hugh Grant is going to burst through the door any second, either that or you’ve been reading too many romance novels and are using the plot that’s in pretty much all of them to fuck with me. You can’t possibly be asking me to pretend to be your fake girlfriend in real life. That shit doesn’t happen.” I kicked the soggy towel off my legs and climbed to my feet. I pointed a shaky finger at him. “You better not be asking me to lie to your family for you, Church, because that is something I won’t do and I won’t forgive you for asking me to do.”

      He swore again and held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not asking you to lie, Dixie. You keep telling me we’re friends, well, I need you to be exactly that. I just need you to be my friend in front of my family.”

      I scoffed at him. “That’s ridiculous.”

      When he was within touching distance he reached out and put one of his hands on my shoulder and used the knuckles of the other to tilt my chin up so that I had no choice but to gaze up at him. “I’m asking you because you are the only person that can help me. I’m asking you because I know you mean it when you say you care about me.” The pad of his thumb moved along the edge of my jaw and again I forgot how to breathe.

      “That’s not fair, Church.” I didn’t like that it felt like he was using my inherent desire to see the people I cared about happy and whole against me.

      “Never claimed to be the kind of guy that plays fair, pretty girl.”

       Pretty girl.

      It was like a knife in my already bleeding heart.

      “I don’t know if this is something