The Things She Says by Kat Cantrell Page B

mere word hadn’t scared him off the subject. But he wasn’t most men, despite her intimate knowledge of his similar equipment. Her cheeks heated and she looked out the window so Kris didn’t notice.
    “Yep,” she said to the glass, and her fingers curled into thin air of their own accord. She’d touched him. There. Her tummy flipped. He’d been harder than Texas soil in a drought. For her. No instruction manual needed to understand that. “Stage five. Figuring out her emotional needs and granting them.”
    “Just hers? Guys don’t have emotional needs?”
    “You’re the one with the equipment. You tell me.”
    “Sure. We have a really emotional need to have as much sex as possible before we die. Survival of the species, you know.”
    “Yeah. Survival.” She rolled her eyes because it seemed like an appropriate reaction when two people shared a dangerous, seductive attraction and one of them felt totally out of her depth. “So that’s why this is about her needs, because guys are easy.”
    “It might be easy to get us willing, but that’s not what we’re talking about, is it? This is all about romance. I’d love to know a woman’s secret for romancing a guy.”
    So would she. Especially the one in the next seat. Then maybe stage five wouldn’t feel so insurmountable.
    She shook her head. “No way, Jose. Women everywhere would throw rotten tomatoes at me as I passed by on the street if I told you.”
    He snapped his fingers in mock disappointment. “Fine, then. Tell me what I’m supposed to be doing to figure out her emotional needs.”
    “That was the paying attention stage. You should already know. Now you have to do it.”
    For a minute, he was quiet, as if processing, and the steady hum of tires on concrete filled the car. “So I’ve figured out what her greatest emotional need is and I’ve done it. What do I get out of the deal?”
    His sidelong glance caught her in the abdomen. A lock of hair fell against his cheekbone. His hair was unbelievably glossy and soft and now that she knew what it felt like, it was so much harder not to touch.
    She sat on her hands. “You’re hopeless. I thought we’d made more progress. You get the realization you’re in love and it’s going to last forever. Stage five means you’re thinking about someone else instead of your own selfish needs. That’s the definition of love. Sacrificing what you want to make someone else happy.”
    “And in your mind, romance and love are the same.”
    “They’re not in yours?”
    Instantly, his expression iced over, and the chill infused her skin. “Not at all,” he said. “Love is elusive. Fleeting. It doesn’t last, and therefore it’s too difficult to pin down with a simple definition. Romance is all about action. A back and forth. Doing something to get somewhere.”
    “Nice.” She tsked to clear the tremor in her throat. He was speaking from the rock bottom of his shriveled heart, and nothing she’d said was getting through. “So, it’s all a necessary evil to get a girl naked.”
    “That’s not what I meant.” His frustrated growl coaxed a smile from her. “Romance is a verb. There’s a physical aspect you can point to and say there’s the romance in this scenario. Like flowers. The right lighting, the setting.”
    “Flower is a noun, Kris. And love is more of a verb than romance. You can’t say ‘I romance you.’ Well, I guess you can, but you’ll sound like English is your second language.”
    “English is my second language.”
    He glared at her, and she started giggling uncontrollably. “I’m sorry. I’m picturing you swooning at my feet as you declare, ‘I romance you.’”
    She laughed so hard, she couldn’t stop, and had to wipe tears from her eyes, ignoring the couple extra that squeezed out. That was stupid, to cry over the fact that such a passionate, expressive man had been hurt badly enough to believe love didn’t last. Yet she presumed to heal all that in a couple of