“No.”
“No?”
“No. I came here to talk to you, but I saw you had someone over and didn’t want to bother you.”
I wanted to look anywhere than at him, but if I looked away he would see the lie on me. Maybe he saw the lie on me now. Maybe he heard my heart beating for him, wanting him.
The wind ruffled his dark hair softly, the shifting gray and blue of moonlight casting him in velvet-edged marble. He was undeniably handsome, eyebrows thickest at the arch over mossy green eyes, nose straight and upper lip delectably heavier than his lower lip.
He looked tired. Lines at the edges of his eyes, across his forehead seemed deeper, and a full day’s stubble spread dark along his jaw.
I wanted to kiss him. To press against his body and be surrounded by his scent, be filled with his warmth. My mouth went dry thinking about it, and other parts of me didn’t care that he’d dumped me.
Would he take me back? Would he want me if I asked him to?
Maybe some of those questions showed on my face. Maybe my need, or my struggle to push my need away, lock it all up with the hope my traitorous heart would not give up, showed through.
Ryder didn’t want me.
He had tried to apologize for how he handled the break up, or maybe for the break up.
Maybe he wanted me a little. But a little couldn’t be enough.
Could it?
His eyes were soft, and his lips curved in a smile that oddly looked sad. “Come inside,” he said, all warmth and need and home. “I’d like...I need to talk to you too. Please come inside with me.”
I shouldn’t. Well, Ishouldtalk to him. Ask him if he murdered Sven. Ask him where he had been in the last forty-eight hours. But I knew if I followed him into his house, I wouldn’t want to talk about murder. I wouldn’t want to know if he was involved with Sven’s death or anything else.
I’d just want him.
“We can do this tomorrow,” I said in a thin voice I barely recognized.
His expression fell and I realized there had been something more than sorrow in his eyes. There had been hope.
This didn’t have to be so hard. We had been friends growing up, friends all our lives before our one date and one night together that had not only ended before it had practically begun, but had also almost ended our friendship.
All those years of friendship deserved something didn’t they? A chance?
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go in. It’s freezing out here.”
He stepped back, looking relieved, but only far enough away to let me open the Jeep door.
“Not exactly the warmest summer we’ve had,” he said.
Weather. We were talking about the weather.
I took it back. Our dating hadn’t destroyed our friendship, it had blown it to smithereens and left behind the dust of conversations suitable for strangers over tea.
“Global warming,” I agreed.
He didn’t know Thor was behind our unseasonable storms, because he not only didn’t know Thor was a god, he didn’t know gods really and truly existed.
But I refused to chat about the weather, because really? We were better than that, even at our worst.
“Everything go okay today?” I asked as we walked up the path. “You sounded kind of...off.”
“It went well enough. Sorry about the call, I was...I don’t know.”
