“I got no expectations, and we’re both free to do anything we please. Anything that feels good to us, you got that? You wanna come to my door and kiss me into next week, you do that. If I want to make you a sandwich in my apartment after your father made it damn sure clear he didn’t want us alone together? I’m gonna do that, too.” Louisiana tasted thick in his throat as he spoke, but he didn’t try to clean up his roots. He wanted her to hear the truth of him, and he couldn’t do that with any fake university accent. “‘Leading on’ is for assholes who think the world owes them something.”

The corner of her mouth turned up. It wobbled a little, but it was kissing cousins with a smile, and he’d take that. Hell yes, he’d take that.

“What’s the second thing?” she asked, her voice still more hesitant than he’d like.

LJ made himself calm and neutral, the way he had to for the colts. And then he asked, “What do you think about what your dad said?”

“He’s right.” Her eyes started to water again. “I don’t want him to be, but he is. I never meant to be a hermit, LJ.”

His eyes narrowed, but he nodded. She ate dinner with him almost every night, but he’d bulldozed his way into her house and into those cooking lessons. As far as he’d seen, it was the only time she spoke to another person about something that wasn’t a horse. So as much as it grated on him, he didn’t argue with her assessment of herself. He just let her talk.

“After the attack, there was the trial. I went back to college, because I wasn’t about to let that jerk chase me away.” She looked away, moving his salt shaker so it was lined up next to the pepper. “Everybody knew what had happened.”

He was all the wrong sizes. His throat too small to breathe through, his shoulders too big to stay still. His hands clamped uselessly together, dangling between his knees. He ignored all the jigsaw pieces of himself and listened.

“When they looked at me, it seemed like the filth of what had happened was all over me.” Her voice rasped against the silence in his kitchen. “I had to say, out loud in court, what Gavin did.”

He shook his head, his gut twisting acidly. It wasn’t right, to make somebody speak to strangers about something so private. Where was the justice in that?

Chair legs squeaked over laminate flooring as he pushed to his feet. He couldn’t change what had happened, but he needed to do something for her. Besides, he had faced enough hard days with an empty belly to know it was better if you didn’t have to.