The little bell over the door tinkled, and a rush of cold air swept over Brynne, reviving her, cooling the heat pulsing in her face.
In that moment, Brynne thought she could quite literally have heard a pin drop.
Eli caught her eye as he passed her on his way to his usual stool at the counter, but he didn’t speak.
“Excuse me,” Brynne told Clay, and then could have kicked herself for being polite to him.
She turned away, slipped behind the counter, grabbed the coffeepot and poured a cup for Eli.
“Is that him?” he asked quietly. Seriously.
Brynne nodded, lips pressed together so tightly that they hurt a little.
“What’s he doing here?”
Brynne’s eyes filled with tears of frustration and anger. “I’m not sure.”
Ignoring his coffee, Eli turned on the stool and looked directly at Clay.
Miranda was still at the table, taking down Clay’s order.
When Eli turned back to Brynne, he asked, “Are you all right?”
Brynne shook her head. “I need to get out of here,” she whispered, feeling like a foolish child, afraid of the dark.
“Okay,” Eli said reasonably. “Get your coat. I’ll buy you lunch over at Sully’s. About time you sized up the competition.”
Brynne bit her lower lip, relaxing a little, now that an escape route had opened.
She fetched the jacket she’d worn earlier from a row of hooks beside Bailey’s back door, and returned to the front of the restaurant, where Eli waited.
“I hate this,” Brynne said, once she was buckled into the passenger seat of Eli’s official SUV. “I feel like such a coward, running away from my own business—”
“Ease up on yourself,” Eli said, checking mirrors as he reversed the SUV onto Main Street. “You’re probably in shock. It’ll wear off if you take time to catch your breath.”
“He wasn’t supposed to come out here until Davey and Maddie’s school lets out for spring vacation.”
“I take it he didn’t bring them,” Eli remarked. His tone was even. Untroubled.
“No,” Brynne answered, breathing slowly and deeply. “He claims he’s going to Seattle for a conference. Clearly, the Creek is a logical stop along the way.”
“Take it easy, Brynne. You’re not doing yourself any good by getting all stressed out.”
“Well, that’s easy for you to say!” Brynne accused, without intending to say anything of the kind. “You aren’t the one he cheated on. You aren’t the one whose dreams were torn down and then set on fire—”
Her voice fell away, and she sat there, in that rig that smelled pleasantly of leather, dog and Eli Garrett. She would have given anything she owned to take back what she’d just said.
“Maybe you should hear the man out,” Eli suggested, very quietly, after a long interval of silence.
They were pulling into the gravel lot at Sully’s Bar and Grill by then.
“There is nothing he can say that I want to hear,” Brynne said miserably. “Unless it’s about the kids.”
“They’re pretty important to you,” Eli said, parking the SUV but making no move to get out. “The kids, I mean.”
“Too important,” Brynne admitted, choking up. She couldn’t look at Eli just then, though she couldn’t have said why. “I love them too much.”
“How is that possible?” Eli asked, very gently. He didn’t touch her, which was both a disappointment and a relief. “Kids are like everybody else. They need all the love they can get.”
“They’re not mine,” Brynne said. “Why can’t I just face that and move on with my life?”
“I don’t know, Bailey. I thought you were moving on with your life.”
Brynne covered her face with both hands, pressed her eyeballs hard with the tips of her fingers.
That hurt, so she stopped.
“I don’t love Clay Nicholls,” she said, “if that’s what you’re implying.”
“Maybe you don’t,” Eli agreed, “but it’s obvious that you haven’t resolved everything where he’s concerned. If you had, you wouldn’t have flipped out the way you did. You wouldn’t have needed to run away.”
Brynne dropped her hands to her lap, clenched them into fists, slammed them once against her thighs. At last, she turned to glare at Eli.
“Now you’re calling me a coward?”
Eli whistled once, in exclamation. It was not a happy tune. “I didn’t say that,” he pointed out. “You need to work through this whole Clay Nicholls thing, Brynne, with or without professional help. Until you do, or at least start making an effort, you and I will have to cool it.”
“I told you, I don’t love Clay!”
“I believe you, but you need to deal with whatever it is you do feel for him. I care for you a lot, Brynne. Maybe I even love you. But until you bury a few ghosts, I don’t see us—you and me—going anywhere that would be good for us.”
This was it, Brynne thought miserably.
She and Eli had barely begun to date.
Now they were breaking up.
Brynne wanted to sob, but she was too proud to do that.
The silence was thick and heavy, weighing on Brynne’s spirit, causing her shoulders to droop and her head to bow.
A single tear trickled down her left cheek.
Eli, with the saddest smile Brynne had ever seen, wiped it away with the side of one thumb.
“Don’t,” he all but whispered, his voice was so low, hardly more than a breath. “Please.”
Brynne sniffled, praying that one tear wasn’t the harbinger to a torrent of ugly crying. “So, we’re back to being just friends?”
“For now,” Eli replied, after a long time. “I’m not angry, Brynne. I’m not jealous of that guy you dated before. You loved him. Things turned sour, and that hurt you. I understand, believe me.”
“But?”
“But Clay can still rile you up, and that means you’re not ready for another relationship. Not a serious one, anyway, and that’s the only kind I want. I don’t do anything by halves, Brynne. I’m either in, or I’m out. Nothing in between.”
He sounded so calm. So sad.
And his mind was made up.
He didn’t want her.