There was a long silence. Yeah. He heard it and he didn’t like it.
She sighed. “I shouldn’t have said that. I think I just retreated from the world after I lost them. You’re the first person I’ve really let into my life at all.”
The road climbed up the mountain in a long series of switchbacks. The drop-off was steep, trees rising from below trying to climb out of the valley, the tops swaying alongside the turnouts, providing a reality check of just how deep the drop actually was.
“I’m grateful you let me in, Scarlet,” Absinthe told her. “Each day that I went to the library you brought me a sense of peace when I needed it the most. Some days I thought I was losing my mind.”
“It was the library, not me, silly.” She wanted it to be her.
She maneuvered the car around a particularly sharp curve. There was a large pond, very marshy, with reeds that protruded like a great jungle all around it. Vivid green plants grew on the surface of the water. A broken wooden fence added to the picturesque look of the landscape, and then she was sweeping around the next bend in the road, up into a grove of shady redwoods.
“It was definitely you, moya literaturnaya ledi. Do you have any idea how many libraries I’ve gone to over the years? There are libraries closer to where I live and none of them ever stilled the chaos that eats me alive sometimes. You do it. That’s all you. Sometimes, I feel that I’m going crazy, that I can’t get my brain to just be still, to be quiet, even when I go to the library, my one refuge, and there you were, my perfect ledi.”
“Absinthe. I’m not a perfect lady.”
“You’re my perfect ledi. You don’t have to be perfect for anyone else. Just me. You fit with me, Scarlet. Hopefully, you feel that I fit with you.”
She loved that. She hadn’t thought of it that way. She only had to fit with Absinthe. No one else. He definitely fit with her. She liked that he thought she was perfect for him. Maybe her imperfections were what drew him to her. Everything about him, so far, had drawn her to him. He had a way of thinking that made her believe she had a chance at life.
“These hell-raising brothers of yours …”
“I may as well tell you my sisters are a bit of hell-raisers too.”
She laughed aloud at the mixture of mock exasperation and very real affection in his voice. “This family of hell-raisers you have, are they going to be around a lot?”
“They’ll be in our back pockets,” he admitted with another exaggerated sigh. “You’ll learn to ignore them.”
Her heart took a little plunge. “I’m not good with a lot of people,” she confessed, genuinely worried again.
“They’ll have your back too, Scarlet,” Absinthe said, confidence in his voice. “They’ve suffered loss, just the way we have. Every single one of them. I wanted to meet with you at the coffee house, somewhere neutral where you would feel safe, because I want to tell you as much as I can about me, about my life and my family, so you know me, you know us, and you feel comfortable enough to make an informed choice. I want to be your choice all the way. I want you to give me your trust, and to do that, baby, you have to know me.”
She took a deep breath. He was so amazing. He was everything she wasn’t. Willing to make himself vulnerable, turn himself inside out in order to take a chance with her. She wanted to be like him, give herself to him so freely. Jump in with both feet. There was a time she could barely remember, when she was young, that she used to trust everyone. She couldn’t remember her mother ever yelling at her. She believed in people and always told Scarlet that there was good in everyone. Her mother was wrong.
“I swear, Absinthe, I’m coming to you to do the same.” She was. To the best of her ability, she was determined to give him what he’d asked of her. She was going to give him the woman she’d locked away—Scarlet Foley.Absinthe glanced down at his phone. A message had come in from Code and there was an alert on it. “Gotta go, babe. See you in a few.” He waited for her acknowledgment. Then he checked in with his team. “Transporter, you have her yet?”
“Your woman drives like a bat out of hell, Absinthe. She knows her way around a car and a road, that’s for damn sure.”
“Stay on her and pass her off as soon as possible. She has good instincts, and if she picks up that she’s got a tail, she’ll ghost out of here so fast we won’t know what hit us.”