“I work with a nice Lori and—”
He burst out laughing. “Fuck, but I like you, Kate.”
Her heart somehow managed to swell with pleasure and also curl in on itself protectively. God, she liked him, too. But—
“Don’t say that,” she murmured. “You can’t. You can’t like me, can’t make me like you because then when it’s over, when you’re done with me, it’ll hurt too much.” She pulled her hand back, sat up straight in her own seat. “I can’t like you, not like that, not enough to want a future.”
Silence.
Long, drawn-out silence.
Then the car shuddered to a stop on the shoulder, and he turned to face her. “Why can’t you want a future, Kate?”
“Why do you care?” she snapped. “This is a fake relationship. It doesn’t mean anything.”
A deadly calm. “Doesn’t it?”
“No!” She tossed her hands up. “We’ve gone on one date—”
“Two.”
Frowning, she stopped. “What?”
“Technically tonight was the second.”
That threw her for a loop, and she froze. “Okay,” she said, unfreezing after a couple of seconds. “So, two dates. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Doesn’t it?”
She crossed her arms, sighed heavily. “You already asked that.”
“And you’re sticking with the answer no?” More calm, his voice so smooth, so even, but below the surface she could sense a fury boiling, and she knew, just knew, that the asshole was going to rear its head.
Still, she might like this man too much, but she wasn’t a fucking weakling. She held his gaze, straightened her spine, and braced herself for the impact that was sure to be lobbed her way.
And stayed braced.
And stayed a little longer.
Then longer still, waiting, knowing he was going to blow up at her.
Eventually, he shifted in his seat, and she jumped, not wanting to, knowing it gave away too much, revealed how brittle and on edge she was.
But she hadn’t been able to help it.
Jaime ran the back of his fingers over her throat, making her shiver, and his words when he spoke after that long moment of silence were gentle, were light. “Then I guess I’ll just have to prove it to you.”
She swallowed hard, missing his hand when he brought it back to the steering wheel. “Prove what?”
Eyes locked onto hers for a searing moment. “That you mean something.”
Those words, said in that gentle, light tone, wafted across the console to her ears, but when her brain processed them, their impact might as well have been a bullet to her gut.
They seared into her, branded themselves on her heart.
He leaned over and slanted his mouth against hers.
It was a quick, hot touch of his lips to hers . . . and it still scorched her down to the bone.
“You mean something to me, Kate,” he murmured before pulling back onto the road and driving her home, as though he hadn’t just rocked her to the core.
Eleven
Jaime
He woke up the next morning to a text that made his heart—the one that was thinking he’d pushed Kate too hard the night before—swell with hope.
The truth was that he was all in for her, and seeing her stare at him, wariness written in the lines of her pretty face, made him feel like shit. He got that it was less to do with him and more to do with her past, but part of him was worried that he wouldn’t be able to break through the barrier she’d placed between them.
Maybe not a deliberate barrier. Perhaps she’d been hurt often enough that the barrier was a permanent fixture.
“Patience,” he murmured to himself, rolling onto his back and sitting up.
Because . . . the text.
Sent at two in the morning, even though she’d been exhausted on the drive home, even after he’d deliberately turned the conversation to something light—movies and favorite restaurants.
The dark circles had seemed to get darker as he’d driven.
Dark enough that he’d eventually stopped talking, stopped trying to think of easy conversational topics that wouldn’t put her on the defensive, and he’d thought there was a real possibility that she might fall asleep on the drive.
She hadn’t.
In fact, he’d fallen. Fallen further, deeper, more entrenched in that woman.
Because then she’d asked about his family—had laughed when he’d described the group text chain he had with his siblings and parents, and how his younger brother, Brad, had left his phone on a table at a restaurant recently and they’d all been treated to a series of emoji-filled texts that took up the entire screen of his cell, courtesy of a rambunctious toddler from the next booth over.
“You need to take lessons from him on emoji-etiquette.”
“From the toddler?”
She nodded.
He laughed. “Is this a lesson of more is better?”
A snort. “I take it back.” She smiled at him, the barrier still there, but hidden beneath brown eyes sparkling with amusement. “Stick with your book.”
Fun. Teasing. Sweet. Smile that fucking took his breath
Actually listening to him when he talked. Touching him when she forgot she was supposed to be keeping her distance—a squeeze on his leg, a brush of fingers on his arm, his jaw.
And now she’d sent him a text in the middle of the night.
I’m sorry about Lori. You deserve someone who sees the wonderful man you are inside.
Absently, he rubbed a hand over his chest, his heart aching.
Sweet. See?
But also, completely blind to the fact that she was wonderful on the inside as well, blind to the notion that a man wanted to wrap himself in the warmth of her, to capture the light in her soul and hold it captive.
Because someone had made her believe she wasn’t worthy of that.
Which circled back to his notion of Jaime being all in for this woman.
First, he wanted to get her some fucking glasses so that when she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw how wonderful she was. Second, he wanted to hunt down the asshole or assholes that made her believe differently.
But in reality, he couldn’t do either of those things until he managed to get through her shields.
Well, luckily, he wasn’t an idiot.
He recognized a good thing when he saw it, knew that she was worth the effort to gain her trust.
Which was why he didn’t text her back.
Instead, he got up and showered.
Instead, he went down to the Farmer’s Market and picked up a bouquet of sunflowers, a half dozen pastries, and two coffees—a mocha for her, just black for him—then drove to her house, glad that they lived close enough that the early Saturday morning drive to her place made the drinks’ temperature drop to drinkable rather than cold and unappetizing.
He parked in front of her house and felt the bottom drop out of his plan. Or hell, maybe it was the bottom dropping out of his world, him plummeting through the hole, falling and falling further.
He’d been thinking he would text, and if that didn’t work, then he’d call her, and then if that didn’t work, he’d go up to her front door and knock or ring the bell.