The Street Where She Lives Read online

  He’d get naked. No problem there.

  Then she’d have to get naked—big problem there. He was perfection, and she… “No.”

  Ben let out a soft, rude noise and dared her with both his eyes and his voice. “Chicken,” he taunted softly.

  “Just being realistic.”

  Another man would have conceded defeat and walked away. Another man would have hidden his thoughts.

  Ben stood there, right there, only inches away, and let her see everything he felt. Annoyance. Heat. Frustration.

  Heat. “You’re really not going let me prove it?”

  “No.” She looked away. “I’m not interested.”

  “Ten minutes,” he promised silkily. “I could rock your world in ten minutes.”

  “Go away, Ben.”

  No big surprise, he did.

  BEN SHOVED OUT the front door, slowing down only to lock it behind him. Asada was long gone, everyone kept telling him that, but he couldn’t break the old habit of watching his back.

  And Emily’s.

  And Rachel’s. Damn her.

  She’d kicked him out. Nothing new. Stepping out the front gate, he joined the early Saturday morning shoppers, of which there were many, and lost himself in the streets. They were as different from the mean, hustling, dangerous streets he’d gotten used to as they could get. These were clean and tantalized with mouthwatering scents from the cafés. They were busy, but also easygoing and safe. No need for this terrible tension and aggression, and no outlet for those feelings, either.

  Stalking along, blindly window-shopping, he was torn between wishing he was on the other side of the world, and wishing Rachel would have let him fulfill his promise. It would kill them both, of course, being together like that again. Or at least it would kill him, but—

  “Ben!”

  Oh, and now he was hearing things. Rachel’s soft voice above the crowd. As if she’d be chasing him down, as if she could—

  “Ben, wait!”

  Whipping around, he stopped short in shock. Rachel, in her loose, gauzy sundress and sandals, using her cane as she chased him down at an alarming speed. She was going to stumble and take a fall, was his first heart-stopping thought.

  She looked frantic to catch him. Him, Ben Asher, the man she’d just shoved out her door.

  “I’m sorry,” she rushed, still coming at him. When she was within two feet, he held out his arms, completely without thought.

  She walked right into them and fit like she belonged there.

  At the slight tightening of his arms and his lack of smile, hers faded. She swallowed hard. “Oh, Ben.”

  The two words spoke volumes and yet didn’t tell him a thing. “Did you want to finish talking about orgasms?” he asked a little hoarsely.

  A woman walking by, arms loaded with shopping bags, looked over with a lifted eyebrow.

  “Uh, no.” Rachel smiled apologetically at the woman. “I was hoping we could talk about…other stuff.”

  “I’d rather give you an orgasm.”

  This time it was a man walking his hundred-pound Saint Bernard who overheard, and he shot them a comical second glance while Rachel closed her eyes. “Talk, Ben. Can we talk?”

  “If that’s all you’ve got.”

  “That’s all you’re getting.” She pointed to a sidewalk café a few buildings down. “Hungry?”

  For you. “Sure.”

  When they were seated, Rachel ordered an iced tea, set her menu aside, and looked at him across the table.

  “What?”

  “Don’t brood.”

  “Why would I brood?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He nodded. “Are you sleeping with Adam?”

  She sighed.

  His heart kicked once, hard. “Are you?”

  “You have such a one-track mind.”

  “Are you?”

  “You know that’s none of your business.”

  He answered with a very impolite one-word expletive and she sighed again. “No, I’m not sleeping with Adam.”

  She wasn’t sleeping with Adam. Thank God. “You’re right,” he said primly, folding his hands. “It’s none of my business.”

  Across the table, she groaned and cupped her face in her hands. “You’re such a jerk,” she said, muffled.

  “Yeah, it’s a special talent of mine.” He took in her confusion, and disgust filled him. Self disgust. What right did he have to want her single?

  It was possible that by this time next week he’d be gone, so far gone.

  The waitress brought the iced teas. To keep them there, at the same table, talking, even if the air was filled with tension, Ben ordered a large brunch.

  “Tell me something,” Rachel said, playing with her straw. “What are you in such a hurry to get back to?”

  “A personal question, Rach?”

  She put lemon and sugar in her iced tea. Took a sip. Pushed the drink aside and looked right into his eyes. “Yes. Maybe it’s because I’m older. More mellow—” She glared when he laughed. “I am,” she insisted, and lifted a shoulder. “I’d really like to know. Tell me why you can’t stand being tied to one place for longer than it takes to do a load of laundry, when there’s no place in particular even waiting for you. No place and no one.”

  “Hey, I’ve done my laundry here. Quite a few times. I’ve even done your laundry. I like your pale-peach satin panties, by the way, and that black lace bra…”

  She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”

  Yeah. Yeah, he did. And because her curiosity was honest and not bitter, because she obviously really wanted to know, he found he could try to admit some of what he thought of as his secret shame, the one thing he’d never told another soul. “Staying in one spot, making roots…it infers you’ve found your home, found yourself.”

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  “But I don’t even know who I really am. I can’t seem to find myself.”

  She sat back, looking a little stunned. “But you know who you are.”

  “Who I am is a man with no idea who his parents were or where I came from.”

  Her eyes softened. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Because I never told you. I couldn’t.”

  “Oh, Ben. Were you always in a foster home?”

  “Yes. It was ‘Christian duty.’ They liked to say that.”

  “That’s so wrong!” Her voice was thick, emotional. “No child should ever feel that they weren’t wanted. I hate that for you.”

  “Don’t,” he said a bit harshly, unable to take her pity. “I’m just trying to explain.”

  “You were never given any information about your past at all?”

  He downed half his glass of tea for his suddenly parched throat. “All I know is that when I was about two days old, I was found in a trash bin in Los Angeles, nearly dead of exposure and starvation.”

  She covered her mouth with her fingers, fingers that shook, he noted. No, it wasn’t a pretty story, but she’d asked. “So yeah, I always knew I belonged nowhere, with no one.”

  “How cruel! How could a foster parent, someone trusted with a child, do that? Make you feel that way?” she cried.

  “Hey. Hey, it doesn’t matter now,” he said, a little surprised, and touched, at the tears shimmering in her eyes. He put a hand over hers. “I’m trying to make you understand, that’s all. Why I don’t like it here.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me all this before?”

  “I never told anyone.” He could hear the hurt and shock in her voice and for some reason, sought to alleviate both. “I just pretended it wasn’t so bad. And when I was with you, it wasn’t.” He smiled into the face of her tears. “Look, Rach, the point of all this is, I always planned on getting out of South Village, only I couldn’t do it until I was eighteen. My entire childhood and adolescence, I was stuck. Held by circumstance, poverty, disregard, whatever. So the minute I graduated—”

  “You got the hell out,” she finished softly.