Still Lake - Anne Stuart [69]
“How old are you?” she asked lazily.
“Twenty.”
“I’m nineteen.”
“You’re seventeen,” he corrected her. “Too young to be having sex.”
“Eighteen in three weeks,” she shot back. “How old were you when you started having sex with your lost true love?”
He looked at her, and she was suddenly ashamed of her flippancy. “Sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”
He nodded, accepting her apology. It might have been a full five minutes before he spoke. “We were in love. I’m not interested in sleeping with someone I don’t care about.”
“Then I guess I’m wasting my time here,” she said, sliding off the fence.
He set the file down on the fence by the chain saw. “Is that what you’re looking for?” he asked in his grave, calm voice.
“Isn’t everyone? Oh, except you with your high standards,” she mocked. “I just want someone to…” The words trailed away.
“Want someone to what? Treat you like a whore? Screw you silly and then dump you? I don’t think so, Marthe.”
“Then what do I want?”
“Someone to love you.”
For some crazy reason she wanted to cry. “So?” she said, defiant. “I told you I was wasting my time here.”
“Not necessarily.” He said it so quietly she wasn’t sure she heard right.
She stood there, feeling oddly vulnerable, not sure what to say. “I’d better go find Sophie. See if she needs anything,” she said finally.
“Yeah, maybe you’d better,” he said, picking up the chain saw with a practiced grace. It was heavy, and he handled it as if it weighed no more than a few pounds.
He couldn’t touch her if he was holding the chain saw, and she wasn’t sure anymore she was ready to have him touch her. Wasn’t sure if she was ready to have anyone love her, particularly a somber, beautiful creature like Patrick.
“I’d better go,” she said again, not moving.
A slow smile spread across his face. “If I’d known that would scare you away I would have tried it a lot sooner.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Yup, you are,” he said confidently. “You think about it, Marthe Davis. I’m not someone you can come and play with when you’re bored. I make commitments, and I stick to them. If you want casual sex you’ll have to look somewhere else.” And he walked off before she could come up with a suitable answer.
The best she could manage was to stick her tongue out at him, but since he was walking away he didn’t get the benefit of the gesture. She had no choice but to head back to the house and her strangely unsettled sister. Maybe she could get rid of some of her restlessness by baiting Sophie. But for some reason she wasn’t really in the mood.
Maybe she’d find something to do. There were three bedrooms left to be painted, and while she hated to seem compliant, activity was better than boredom. And then maybe she’d find out exactly what her straight-laced sister had been doing in the middle of the night with that mysterious stranger.
Sophie was not in a good mood. They were all watching her, and it was driving her absolutely crazy. By the time they’d finished dinner she was ready to bite everyone’s head off. She resisted the impulse. Grace would dissolve into tears, Marty would jump into the fray with an energetic belligerence, and things would go from awful to god-awful in seconds.
She finally couldn’t take it anymore, and once dinner was finished she walked out of the house into the warm night air. They’d either do the dishes or not—she wasn’t going to worry about it. As a matter of fact, Marty had been surprisingly industrious today, putting a primer coat on the three back bedrooms. Her black-and-fuchsia hair now had a streak or two of white from the paint, but the effect was impish rather than bizarre. And for all Doc’s worries, Grace seemed uncharacteristically peaceful, even calling out after Sophie as she stomped from the kitchen.
“Have fun, love. Make him use a condom.”
It wasn’t enough to make her turn back. She repressed the urge to snarl, continuing out into the gathering dusk. She wasn’t going anywhere near the Whitten place, anywhere near John Smith. She was going to get in the car and drive, maybe even as far as Montpelier