Blinking, Anna glanced up. “Excuse me?”
“You shouldn’t stay friends with him,” she repeated slowly. “If you have even the slightest feelings for the guy or feel bad when you spend time with him.”
Well, she didn’t feel bad around Lucas. Quite the opposite. She felt damn good. But that didn’t mean she had feelings for him!
She realized she used the word ‘feel’ a lot when she thought about him, but that didn’t mean she hadfeelings. The two were very different.
Right?
“You look like you’re panicking,” Lucy frowned. “Why?”
“I…I don’t have feelings!” she exclaimed.
“No feelings ever at all, little goblin? Sounds brutal,” she replied with a smile.
Anna laughed mirthlessly. “You know what I mean.”
“Oh man, she’s as bad as her brothers,” Lucy whispered meaningfully in Penny’s direction.
“Lucy!”
“Yeah, yeah, sorry. But you sound like Dax. So the guy you don’t feel anything for is lucky.” She smiled and clinked herglass against Anna’s. “Cheers to your secret boyfriend. And don’t listen to Maddie. You can be friends with an ex-lover if you want. I do it all the time. But you don’t want to undress friends. So if that’s a problem…?”
“It’s not,” Anna said stiffly. “That’s…over.”
“Well then,” Maddie said, “let’s talk about something else because the underlying tension here is making me nervous.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Penny agreed, also clinking glasses.
Anna smiled and pushed Lucas out of her mind. You don’t think about friends all the time, after all…
Chapter Fourteen
Fourteenth encounter
“Why do you always smell like honey? What kind of deodorant is that?”
“You’re talking again.”
“And I won’t stop until you tell me where I can get that scent, I…”
Then he silenced her insistently.
Lucas would claim he was good at forgetting, at pushing things away and simply not thinking about them anymore. Anna Temple would be one of those things.
“Lu, when is Anna coming to visit us again?”
That morning’s breakfast dishes were set on the table.
“I don’t know, Mel,” he said calmly, handing her the bread to put in the toaster while he flipped the fried egg. “It was a one-time thing that she looked after you.”
“Oh.” Melody furrowed her small brow and turned on the toaster before asking, “Why?”
“Because she’s busy.”
“Because she’s a doctor?”
“Yep.”
