“How’s the ankle?”

She lifted her tilty-green gaze, but there was no surprise at seeing him. “I’ll live.”

He stared, the need in him rising more quickly than expected as every cell in his body clamored for action and release. A fiery blush crept up her neck. When the sweep of heat tagged her cheekbones, she made a disgruntled noise in the back of her throat, and knowing he still had that effect on her had his dick at attention in an instant.

“Some things don’t change, I see,” she said as she slipped her phone into a purse slung over her shoulder. “You’ve not become a sparkling conversationalist in the intervening years, Beck.”

“We never needed to talk, princesa.”

Man, how she used to hate that endearment, though in days past, using it had sparked some of their most pleasurable moments together. He would goad her until her cheeks flushed and his cock swelled and relief could only come from sinking his fingers in her hair, her mouth, her slick-for-him sex.

Now, on a razor’s edge, the moment lived, then deflated when she gave him a nervy smile. She looked unsure, vulnerable, not at all like the girl he knew.

“What are you up to these days?” he asked.

Thoughts ran circles over her face as she geared up to . . . huh. Lie her sweet ass off.

“This and that. Mostly helping with Grams’s recovery and organizing the charity fund-raiser for the homeless she hosts each year. Big party in a couple of weeks.”

Maybe this was a boyfriend or that was a husband.

“How’s Preston Collins III?”

Her composure took another hit, but on the beat of three she picked herself right back up and smoothed her expression to a cool slate.

“I’ve no idea.”

“So your marriage didn’t work out?”

“I never got married. That was something my father wanted, not me.”

There was no time to enjoy the sweet balm of relief those words created in his chest. Something else was going on here, a restlessness about her that matched his own edgy mood. The tell in her eyes piqued his interest. Time to double down.

“So how mad at me are you right now?”

She sucked in a breath. “Mad? At you? Why would I be mad at you?”

“Oh, I dunno.” Because he had dropped her like a bad habit. “You seem uncomfortable at seeing me again. Pissy.”

“Beck,” she said in the tone of one about to explain something to a dimwit. “When I was eighteen years old, you broke my heart. Stomped on it. Pulverized it into a mess I thought would be irreparable. I cried for two months, cut my hair and dyed it a really awful blond, let it grow out, made friends in college. I even had a boyfriend, a hot linebacker who was excellent in bed. But every day since, I’ve wished I was here with a guy who voluntarily runs into burning buildings. I wanted to be waiting at home with my heart stuck to the roof of my mouth, hoping he’d text me whenever a warehouse fire was splashed all over the local news. I longed to be getting into arguments about whether it was okay to use my family’s money to get us a better apartment because my man was so proud he insisted on supporting us on his city salary.”

“So, still mad.”

She angled her head, taking him in like he was a bug not worthy of her attention. And then she gave him a huge-ass smile.

Fuckin’ A! Hell, fuckin’ B, C, D, and E. He felt like he’d been pumped with a triple dose of tropical sunshine.

“Sorry, just needed to get it out,” she said. “You dumped me a month after we had sex for the first time and that kind of thing is enough to give a girl a complex. I had it in my head that I must have been god-awful in the sack.”

Mierda. Surely she had not been living with that?

She stayed the tip-of-his-tongue protest with a hand, and that she still had the imperious thing going on put his groin on serious notice.

“But I realized fairly quickly that it was for the best. We were from different worlds, Beck. I don’t harbor any grudges.”

Listening to her mature and measured assessment should have put him at ease. Should have. But his body did not feel loose. His mind did not accept this.

“It’s okay to be a little ticked off,” he said, strangely ticked off himself at her self-possession. “I treated you pretty shabbily.”

She arched a dark eyebrow, its delicate upward curve a message in itself. “After all this time, you’d rather I was angry. You’d rather I kept you in here”—she touched a clenched fist to the soft swell of her breast—“because it would mean I still care and you still have some power over me.”

Yes, a million times, yes. He hooked her pearls to bring her closer and then, very deliberately, placed one palm against the hallway’s wall inches from her heat-stained cheek.

“I’d rather you were mad because then I could make it better. Remember what I used to do to calm you down? Your dad would piss you off and then I would piss you off more and before you knew it, you were coming apart, screaming my name.”

A muscle ticked at the corner of her mouth, begging for his thumb to soothe it.

So he did.

“Kissing you, touching you, every hurried fumble in my car, every time we explored each other’s bodies—it was all amazing. And when after months, years of waiting, I finally drove deep inside you where I belonged, that was also amazing, Darcy. Sex had nothing to do with why we didn’t work out.”

There. He’d said it. As for the reasons for their split—the real reasons—now was neither the time nor the place. Might never be, but she needed to know she was not to blame.

The soft thud of a closing door signaled that someone was exiting the restroom around the corner. A guy weaved by on his way back to the bar, and with each passing second, Beck’s heart thundered in his ears.

He turned back to Darcy in time to catch her blinking away an intrusive thought. “Thank you for setting the record straight and letting me know my sexual inexperience was not a contributing factor.”

Uh-oh. Sarcastic, if his snark-o-meter was calibrated right. “You said you had a complex.”

“I said it was enough to give a girl a complex.” She rubbed a tuft of his coarse beard between her finger and thumb, like she was testing the quality of fabric in a high-end store. “But I figured out quickly that I’m rather awesome, both in and out of the bedroom. Lots of hot college guys helped with my sexual awakening.”

“Your what?”

“My sexual awakening. Those first few months of school, I jumped right in with all the zeal of a frat boy at a kegger. Discovered what I like.” She tugged on his beard and it felt surprisingly good, despite the fact he was half-past pissed at the words spilling from her pert, kissable mouth. “What I don’t like.”

A tight band of steel squeezed around his chest, and the pounding in his ears grew louder. He had been the one to nurture her sex-starved body, not some Dockers-wearing college boy. Beck’s nineteenth year had been one of the most painful of his life. A year of stiff sheets and balled-up tissues, every cock-stroking fantasy filled with sweet, sexy Darcy begging him to touch her, take her.

Own her.

Denying his raging needs for months, he made sure to take care of hers until finally he surrendered to her tight, virginal body the night of the funeral, in the boxing ring at the gym where he had made Sean and Logan proud so many times. Not how he had planned it at all. It was too rough, too raw, too damn visceral. But he had needed her desperately, the only drug that could numb his soul-splitting pain.

He scrubbed a hand across the scruff on his jaw. “You like the beard, princesa.”

“It disgusts me,” she deadpanned, but there was no missing the wisp of a smile on her lips. Teenage Darcy was a fiery creature, spoiled and perpetually indignant, and the ability to laugh at herself was not part of her makeup. Somewhere along the way, she had developed a sense of humor, and damn if that wasn’t sexier than every one of her soft, womanly curves.