Except with David, she kept forgetting to do any of those things.
Silence stretched, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. The waves continued their eternal conversation with the shore. The drones hummed overhead, casting shifting shadows across the sand. In the distance, night birds called to each other in voices that sounded almost like music.
David reached out, his fingers trailing through her hair before pushing it behind her ear with a gentleness that made her breath catch. His touch was warm, fingers callused—probably from all his keyboard work—and unbearably tender.
“That’s not who I see.” The conviction in his voice cracked something open inside her.
Something caught there, a fishhook of emotion she couldn’t name, pulling tight. She blinked, but nothing about the look in his eyes faded. They were so dark in this light, serious and searching and focused on her as if she were the only person in his world.
David shifted closer. Near enough to catch a whiff of his cologne—understated and clean with a hint of citrus. Near enough to see the individual lashes framing his eyes, the slight stubble that suggested he forgot to shave this morning.
She didn’t move back. Didn’t crack a joke. Didn’t do any of the things she normally did when someone got too close, when her protective walls thinned.
She wet her dry lips, and his gaze tracked the movement, something flaring in his eyes that sent heat cascading through her body.
“You always do this?” The question came out breathier than she intended, want and uncertainty tangled together in two syllables.
“What?” His own voice dropped an octave, rougher around the edges.
“Lean in like you’re rebooting my whole personality.”
His mouth tilted in that almost-smile that drove her crazy. “Only for people who probably taste like sarcasm and truffle.”
Their faces were terrifyingly close now. The warmth of his breath ghosted across her lips. Close enough that if she just leaned forward a fraction of an inch?—
She closed her eyes, surrendering to the inevitable, to the want that had been building between them for weeks. Her heart sped up.
His warm hand grazed her jaw, and?—
BEEP.
His tablet chirped to life with a pulsing red icon, the sound sharp and jarring in the intimate quiet.
David swore, jerking back so abruptly that Lena’s eyes flew open in confusion.
The spell snapped like a rubber band pulled too tight, tension draining faster than red wine into white carpet. Lena shivered, skin chilled now that it was bereft of his warmth. Annoyance flashed. She wasn’t some Victorian maiden to be sitting here with her eyes closed and her lips parted waiting for a kiss.
“What is it?” she said, her voice still thick with whatever had been about to happen, with all the words unsaid and touches unmade.
“Shit. System breach.” David grabbed the tablet, his fingers flying across the screen, all business now. The transformation was jarring—from almost-lover to CTO in the space of a heartbeat. “It’s the generator firewall again. Same access pattern as the last one—someone’s tripping internal code from inside the boundary.”
Lena’s gut twisted, arousal curdling into anxiety. “Tonight?” She pushed herself upright, brushing sand from her palms. “They’re taking bigger risks.”
“Getting bolder.” His jaw clenched as he scanned the incoming data, the tablet’s glow painting his features in harsh blue light. “This is more sophisticated than before. They’re learning our patterns. I have to go trace it before they break something vital.” He was already standing, shoving his feet into his sandals with jerky, frustrated movements.
Still stunned, still reeling from the whiplash of almost-kiss to emergency, Lena nodded. She brushed invisible sand from her shins more out of a need for movement than anything else, her hands needing something to do that didn’t involve reaching for him.
“Go. I’ll bring this stuff back to the house.”
David paused at the tree line, one hand braced against a palm trunk, and turned back. The light from his tablet illuminated him from below, casting dramatic shadows across his face. “We’re not done,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
Lena raised an eyebrow, reaching for her armor of sarcasm because it was easier than admitting how much she didn’t want to be done, how much she wanted to finish what they’d started. “That a line?”
“It’s a fact.” His gaze searched hers, intense across the distance, even with half his attention on whatever crisis was unfolding in his digital world. “I’m just re-routing.”
When he disappeared into the shadows, tablet lighting the path ahead of him like some kind of technological torch, Lena blew out a breath. It shuddered out of her, taking with it some of the tension that coiled in her shoulders.
She looked at the flopped-open container of truffles, at his carefully arranged picnic, at the drones keeping their mosquito vigil overhead. One truffle was half-melted from her nervous fingers earlier, glistening like something sacred in the amber light.
