“Why are you so pissed off about a couple of checks?”
Harper turned to him and shot him a look. “Is that what you think this is about? Did you hit your head today?”
“It sounds like you’re questioning my intelligence,” he ventured, signaling the waitress for a coffee.
“It sounds like you’re trying to play dumb,” Harper snapped. “This isn’t about the checks. This is about what they represent.”
“Money?”
“I will knock your perfect ass off that stool.”
She might actually try it. “Me not telling you about money that you found going through my mail?”
“Really? That’s how you want to play this? Accusing me of snooping when I opened a stack of mail that you gave me to open? Try again.”
She had him there. He sighed. “Harper, there is nothing in our arrangement that says we have to tell each other everything.”
“Why are you like that? What is wrong with you? Why can’t you just share things? It’s not sexy-mysterious anymore. It’s hurtful.”
“Why is it hurtful? I didn’t purposely keep anything from you. The money is from a patent that Aldo and I hold on an engineered joist system. It’s not a big deal.”
“What’s a big deal to me is that I open up to you about all the sordid details of my past and you can’t even share good things with me. Why the hell is that?”
“I told you before, I’m not a hearts and flowers kind of guy.”
“We’re not talking about hearts and flowers. We’re talking about intimacy. And you can’t just expect me to share things with you when you have no intention of opening up to me.”
“That isn’t who I am, Harper.” Luke shrugged. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you. Those checks aren’t even on my radar. Not when I have less than two weeks before I leave my home and my family for six months.”
“That’s another thing you won’t talk about.”
“What? Deployment? What is there to talk about?” He let some of his frustration seep into his tone. “I’m leaving. End of story.”
“That is not ‘end of story’ and you know it.”
He spun her around sideways on the stool to face him and kept his hands on her thighs. “Look. You want something that I can’t give you. I think you’re getting in too deep here. You’re trying to establish a relationship where there can’t be one. I don’t share. I don’t open up and talk about my feelings or what I’m thinking. And even if I did, I’m leaving. For six months. There isn’t going to be an ‘us’ when I come back. And I’m starting to think that maybe there shouldn’t be an us now.”
“Do you want me to leave?” She leveled a look at him, daring him to say what he didn’t mean.
He sighed. “No, I don’t want you to leave.” There. How was that for honesty? “I like having you around. I even like having the dogs around. I think our working relationship is great. But maybe it’s time we back off of the more ... intimate area.”
“Sex?”
The waitress paused wide-eyed as she put the coffee mug down in front of him.
Luke waited until she wandered down the counter to the next patron. “Yes. Sex,” he said quietly. “It’s starting to confuse the situation. Let’s just go back to the way things were for the rest of the month. Stick with the plan. You’re saving money and doing a job search. Thanks to you, I’m getting caught up at the office and getting things organized for when I’m gone. We can make this work, Harper. But not by complicating things.”
“So I explain to you that it hurts me when you withhold things from me and your solution is to further reduce our relationship to boss-employee?”
Why did women always make things so difficult? He was protecting her. Why couldn’t she see that?
“Harper, this is in your best interest.”
“So you’re saying you’re protecting me from my own feelings by taking sex off the table.”
She didn’t sound impressed, but Luke was committed. Maybe it wasn’t only her feelings he wanted to protect. There was something about the rawness between them that scared the crap out of him. He didn’t want it to go any farther. Any deeper.
“I’m saying we’re complicating a situation that doesn’t need to be complicated. Let’s just go back to the plan.”
