f cutting a tomato and glanced over at him in puzzlement. “Eric and Zara,” he clarified.
“Oh. Maybe a little, yeah.”
“Why?”
She turned back to her task, thinking. “A couple reasons, I guess. One, you’ve mentioned he . . . wasn’t your favorite person,” she said cautiously.
“He goes through women like a lawn mower.”
“That’s kind of a brutal way to put it,” she said, setting down the knife. “Why do you dislike him? You’ve never really said.”
For a moment, he didn’t answer. Laila turned toward him and leaned against the counter, watching him methodically setting out the meat.
“All my life, he was held up as an example of the right way to do things. ‘See how Eric ties his shoes? Do it like that, the way you do it is wrong. See how Eric swings the bat? That’s the way I’ve been trying to get you to do it. Eric is going to Harvard, why did you have to pick Stanford?’”
“Eric is working for the family business. And you’re choosing not to,” Laila finished quietly.
He nodded once, picking up some salt and pepper from the counter. “That’ll be what I hear at the end of this vacation, only it won’t sound quite so nice as the way you put it. He’s always showing this fake version of himself to my parents and everyone in the family. When no one was around that he thought he should impress, he showed his true colors. He was a rude, blackmailing little monster when he was a kid. Nowadays, he’s a selfish. Two-faced. Bastard,” he said, emphasizing each word with a hard shake of the salt shaker. Laila noticed the tightness of his jaw and went over to him. She put her hand on his wrist, halting his action. He glanced over at her in surprise.
“You’re not Eric,” she said softly. “You’ve known that your whole life, and everyone—most notably, your parents—seemed to know it too. They just didn’t see the difference as a good thing. And that’s what really gets to you, isn’t it?”
“I guess,” he said gruffly after a pause.
“But it is a good thing, Asher. It is.”
Suddenly, he leaned down and kissed her. Hard.
And then sweet.
She blinked dazedly when he lifted his head a moment later. She felt flushed and flustered. “What’d I do to deserve that?” she wondered.
“You’re you.”
“Thanks,” she said, smiling, extremely pleased by his answer.
“Are you worried about Zara?” he asked. “Because I can talk to Eric, if you are.”
“I don’t know. Zara has always been able to take care of herself. Maybe I should be the one to talk to her. She tends to get herself in too deep sometimes. And Eric isn’t the guy she should be doing that with. This situation isn’t,” she said, thinking. She glanced up at Asher, suddenly uneasy.
“You’re wondering how smart you’re being. Aren’t you?” he asked grimly, stepping over to the sink and turning on the tap with his wrist. “With me,” he added, glancing over his shoulder.
She couldn’t think of what to say.
He finished washing his hands and reached for a towel. He tossed it aside a moment later and walked over to her, standing only a few inches away. She looked up when he grabbed both her hands at once.
“You said earlier there were a few reasons Zara and Eric make you uncomfortable. Is one of the reasons that they remind you of us?”
He’d hit the nail on the head. She nodded.
“I worry about the same thing. That’s what I was trying to say last night. But now . . . I think maybe I was wrong.”
“You do?”
He nodded slowly. She stared up at him, caught by something she read in his eyes. He stepped closer to her, so that their fronts brushed together. As always, the feeling of his body against hers created a vacuum in her lungs. It made her flesh prickle with awareness and pleasure. It confused her too. He interfered with her common sense. He cradled her jaw and tilted her face upward. She could still smell the soap on his freshly washed hands.
“I know it seems like everything is against us. We’re both only here for a short period of time. You have to lie to your family and sneak away to see me, and I can tell how much you hate that. I start a new job across the country in August. Neither of our parents would approve of us seeing each other.”
She flinched slightly beneath his cradling hands. She’d assumed that his parents would never approve, given what she’d learned about them so far. But suspecting and hearing him say it were two different things. Had the truth hit him this hard, when she’d said her parents wouldn’t allow her to date him? If so, she hadn’t given him enough credit for his stoic reaction.