“Well, I was looking forward to having a cute best man to dance with!”
He raised his eyebrows. “You saying I’m not cute?”
“Stop that.” She reached out and swatted at him. “You know that isn’t what I’m saying.”
He caught her arm, meaning to fend her off, but he held on a second too long. They seemed to realize at the same moment that they were touching, and Theo thought,I need to let go of her.
But he didn’t.
“What are you saying, then?” he asked, his voice coming out in a lower register than he’d meant it to.
She searched his gaze, cleared her throat. “I’m saying… I’m just saying that I thought I’d be paired with someone who would want to spend the night dancing with me. I thought I’d be withsomeone who was as excited about the wedding as I am, and that we’d be caught up in the moment, and…”
She trailed off, her eyes moving to his hand on her arm. He loosened his grip slightly, but he didn’t let go, and suddenly it felt less like he was fending her off and more like he was pulling her in.
“And?” he prompted, surprised by the way his heart was beating double-time, by how eager he was to hear whatever she was going to say next.
“It would be a romantic moment,” she murmured. “But that’s not you. I know how you feel about romance.”
“You know how I feel aboutmarriage,” he countered. “You don’t know how I feel about romance.”
He saw the moment her breath caught.
He rose up to his knees, pulling her toward him, moving with no thought and no plan. It was all instinct. All action and chemistry and heat.
And then she was in his arms and his mouth was on hers.
The taste of her! She was intoxicating. Suddenly, he couldn’t believe he had waited this long to kiss her. He couldn’t believe that he’d failed to recognize the constant tension between the two of them for what it was. How had he not seen it? He’d thought he was annoyed by her, but he had also felt that strange draw to her in spite of his annoyance. He’d set it aside, hadn’t let himself think too deeply about it, but now…
She fell back, pulling him down with her into the softness and the warmth of their makeshift bed.
I shouldn’t be doing this. It could ruin everything.
But he couldn’t turn things around now. They had come too far.
CHAPTER 16
THEO
The sunlight coming in through the massive window on the back wall woke Theo.
There was no moment of disorientation, no struggle to recall where he was or how he had gotten there. He felt the warmth of Harper in his arms before he opened his eyes, and he knew exactly what he would see when he did.
But even so, he wasn’t prepared for it.
He couldn’t have imagined how beautiful she would look in sleep, with all the usual guarded tension gone from her face, with her hair spilling loose around her. She was like a different woman. He lay there for a moment, amazed at the fact that he got to see her like this, that he got to experience this side of her at all. It felt like a miracle.
Then he heard a scraping at the door and snapped out of it.
He sat bolt upright. They weren’t expecting rescue until tomorrow. But someone was pushing the door open, and in a minute they would be able to see him and Harper. They could probably explain away the fact that they had come out here andstayed the night after their car trouble, but he didn’t think the proprietors would be nearly as understanding about what had taken place on these couches last night.
He scrambled over the back of his, hurried across the room, and threw himself down on another nearby sofa, hoping it would appear to onlookers as though that was where he’d spent the night. He closed his eyes and did his best to feign sleep, even though his heart was pounding madly.
“What the hell?”
The voice was a female one. Theo opened his eyes, pretending it had woken him. He sat up and blinked, pretending to be confused.
The woman stood in the doorway, clearly hesitant about coming in. Theo didn’t blame her — for all she knew, she was walking into an ongoing robbery.
