“Uh-huh.”
I laughed. “I promise you’re safe. I’m good with cars.”
I don’t know if it was my laughter or just the confidence in my voice, but he stopped eyeing the Jeep. He didn’t, however, stop eyeing me.
“In that case.” Daniel tossed the keys back. “Maybe you could test drive it with me until the smoke clears.”
I was used to being flirted with. Compared to Sean, this barely qualified, but with Sean, I always knew his flirting was building to a big, fat nothing. With Daniel, I didn’t know anything.
I could hear the sound of machinery running in the main garage. Dad definitely wouldn’t sign off on me taking a ride with a guy he didn’t know, and I definitely wouldn’t want to explain that I knew Daniel because we’d spent a couple nights talking on our roof.
Nope, nope, nope.
The question then was, could I go and be back before Dad noticed?
I was mentally weighing the odds when Daniel took my hesitancy for something else and his back stiffened.
“Look, about the other night, I don’t know how much you overheard, but I’m not a criminal and I don’t hurt people. Ever.”
My stomach flipped. I hadn’t even been thinking about that, though I should’ve been. I didn’t know Daniel. He could be exactly what his mother said. She’d know better than I would. Only, in the brief scene I’d witnessed, I was already more inclined to believe him over the person who’d been hurting him. All she’d done—my eyes went once again to the two scars I’d spotted before—and he hadn’t even lifted a hand to defend himself. I still had a lot of unanswered questions about Daniel, but whether or not I was afraid of him wasn’t one of them.
“There’s a Sonic a few miles up the road. If the Jeep is still smoking by then, I’ll buy.”
The smile he gave me seemed to sneak up on him.
* * *
Daniel’s Jeep didn’t have AC so we rolled the windows down. It helped as much as sitting in front of an oven with a fan.
I flipped my hair over the headrest after we found a semishaded spot in the Sonic Drive-In parking lot and ordered two lemonberry slushes.
So cold. So sweet. I drained half of mine so fast I got a brain freeze. Before I could process anything but the stabbing throb in my head, Daniel reached over and slid his thumbs over my temples, rubbing in tiny circles. I wasn’t expecting him to touch me, so I jumped.
Daniel drew back. “It helps, promise.”
He waited half a second before placing his hands back on either side of my face; the gentle pressure of his thumbs forced the ache further and further away and replaced it with a slinking sensation like cool air ghosting over heated skin.
Only it was brutally hot both outside and inside his Jeep.
That close, I could track the drop of sweat gliding down Daniel’s neck. He shifted his upper body and I pressed back against my seat, watching the rise of his chest against his T-shirt. I traced the slight curve of his lip with my gaze the way I used to trace Sean’s when he wasn’t looking.
But Daniel was looking.
Seconds had passed along with the pain in my head. What was left was the heat from his hands, the tickle of his warm breath mixing with mine, and a sudden awareness of being so close that I felt blood flush my cheeks.
Daniel’s dark brown eyes directly met mine until they dropped a few inches to flicker over my mouth.
“This is sort of like your breeze last night, huh?” He pulled his hands away. “I oversold it.”
It took me a second to realize he was still talking about his brain-freeze remedy. I didn’t think he’d oversold anything. “No, it worked. Thanks.”
I couldn’t stop stealing glances at him. I sipped my slush more slowly after that, though I did have to check a brief impulse to chug it again. Would he touch me again if I got another brain freeze? Would it feel the same? Would it feel better?
Was I really thinking about a guy who wasn’t Sean?
“So what do you do when you’re not fixing cars?”
Daniel’s totally normal question brought me out of the hormone-driven thoughts I was having. I put my slush in the cup holder.
