Before she could give herself time to rethink it, she leaned over and pressed her lips right over the dimple at the corner of his mouth. The little divot tasted like cheesesteaks and potato chips and salt and a thousand other warm and sexily comforting things that were one thousand percent going to torture her all night long.
Damn it. Cover, Anita. Cover.
Patrick’s wonderful face was too close to her own. Was he angry? He must be angry.
He didn’t look like it, though. His dark-blue eyes had clouded over, and his gaze was fixed on hers. If looks were fire, she would need a specialized burn unit.
Was he going to kiss her?
Red lights flashed warning in her brain even as her heart warmed.
She had to shut this down. But she wanted it so badly. The knot of repression that she had wound so tightly simply begged to be ripped open, laid bare.
Patrick was not Mikhail. Patrick was more than Mikhail, more than Giorgio, more than Tyler. He was the best man she had ever known.
She did not deserve him.
But damn it, he was now very, very close to her, his breath hot against her skin.
“Thank you.” She might have croaked like a frog, but the words popped some balloon of tension in the air. She pulled back, unable to meet his gaze. His breath, so warm and inviting with the promise of a thousand mornings of French toast and crossword puzzles under quilted blankets, caught in his throat, and he made some sort of strangled sound. He was not for her. “Um. Bye.”
With that witty rejoinder, she pushed open the car door and cursed herself in eight languages as she unlocked the studio, relocked it behind her, walked up the twenty-two steps to her apartment, and then she crashed face-first into her brightly colored comforter.
Chapter Ten
Monday passed in an odd blur of activity. Early Tuesday morning, Anita’s phone exploded on her nightstand with text messages. Anita blearily looked through them, groaning. Ever since she had kissed Patrick’s dimple, well, fine, ever since he had come back from New York, she had not been able to get her eight hours. She was frustrated, exhausted, and had bags under her eyes the size of the Keystone Star Ball trophy. It did not bode well for competition.
Neither did the fact that Toni kept missing Zumba classes. Anita checked through her texts. The excuse this morning was that she said that she had missed the last train out of Philadelphia and wouldn’t be back in Lewis before class. Super. Add that to the list of the things she had to do today.
Yoga would even her out. That’s what it was for, right? She closed her eyes in namaste, focusing on her breathing, but Patrick kept intruding on her thoughts. Odd things, like his sweat that smelled of cinnamon and mint, the feeling of his strong and steady hands when they danced, the feel of his skin against her lips, the way his mouth curved ever so slightly that just made her want…
Anita opened her eyes. Namaste be damned. Now he had ruined her morning routine.
Anita sighed and finger-combed her long blonde hair. She had once read a book about a stalker who had switched her target’s shampoo for hair remover.
Great. It was surely a short step from breaking into her studio to scrawl cryptic messages to hair remover in her shampoo.
Nobody would have broken into her apartment, right?
Anita glanced around her bedroom. Everything seemed in order. Well, as ordered as it ever was. There were only threepaperbacks and two ice-cold mugs of tea on her nightstand. She was just being paranoid.
A shower. Warm water, start over—
Oh my God, what would Patrick look like massaging soap onto his chiseled abs glistening with water droplets?
Shit.
A run, then. She would run him and the weird lipstick letters and creepy SUVs out of her system, and then everything would be back to normal.
Right.
****
Anita walked the last half mile back to her studio and apartment, panting heavily. March was so far ending on a blustery but behaved streak, and she could feel the warmer April air starting to push through the cold front. She had just enough time for a quick shower and breakfast before comp prep with Patrick. Once she caught her breath, of course.
She leaned against the wall of the studio, one hand on her ankle to stretch her quads. Through the glass-paneled door, she could see Patrick leaning against the check-in desk, arms crossed over his neon green Zumba tank and glaring at something on his phone. His brown hair was spiked with sweat, and his tanned muscles appeared far too tense for someone who had just spent an hour shaking it to Flo Rida and Pitbull.
He looked up as the bell clanged, but the narrow suspicion in his eyes softened as he registered her.
