“Please,” she scoffed.
Temper licked at him again. “Men drool over you all the time.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh,please.”
“What was that guy doing last night? Oh, yeah. Drooling.” He ran a frustrated hand through his hair because this was not going where it should. “Look, in the pub, I didn’t react the way I did because of what he was projecting. You are a beautiful woman, so of course he would do that. But you were uncomfortable, and he wasn’t taking the hint.”
“Rob is analmost-somethingthat didn’t, and never will, become something. But that was not the only, or the biggest, issue.”
“I see.” He looked away for a second, then back at her. “You want full disclosure? Alright. If we’re here for honesty, then you need to know that if you could smell me the way I can smell you, you’d find out your reaction to me is very much reciprocated.”
Silence. But not empty. It was filled with that spike in her scent again. The hit was immediate, and his body answered before his brain could stop it. He shifted on his feet, a pathetic attempt to adjust his now too-tight pants without making it obvious.
It did not work.
Her eyes flicked down.
Then up at him while color bloomed high on her cheeks.
His pulse throbbed in his throat. He’d never felt so unbalanced, so clueless, in his life.
“That’s neither here nor there,” she said, but it came out softer than before.
“And you’re not unaffected by it,” he answered quietly, because if he was going to burn, he might as well go all in.
Another pulse of that scent. Her arms were still crossed, but her fingers had curled into her sleeves now. She nudged her chin toward the box he was holding, like she needed an anchor before things tipped somewhere neither of them could easily walk back from. “What’s that?”
“Meat.”
That surprised her out of that hot and awkward moment. “Okay?”
Damn it, he was the worst. What was wrong with him when this woman was around? “Because I thought I could come and help you with the basement—days are long enough to put a few hours into it. And then I thought we might, I don’t know, throw something on the grill?”
“So you’re inviting yourself to dinner.”
“I—” Holy mother of God help him.
But she chuckled. “I’m just messing with you. We can definitely fire up the grill, but you must know, I’m the worst barbecuer on earth.”
Breathing was so good. “I’m not too bad.”
She shook her head. “All right, Rex. Let’s start over.”
“That would be great.”
THE BASEMENT WAS, INfact, a mess.
Not the condemned-by-the-county sort of mess, but more like years of an I’ll-deal-with-it-later-and-later-never-came sort of mess. The air was cooler down there, stale and thick with dust. The musty smell of old cardboard mixed with old wood. Underneath, he could still smell faint traces of her grandpa. Old Spice soap, pipe tobacco. Faded but stubborn, just like the man had been. He stepped down the last stair and looked around. “All right,” he said slowly. “This is not bad.”
Her hands went to her hips as she stared flatly at him.
“It’s not terrible,” he corrected. “It’s cluttered. Aggressively.”
She huffed. “Great.”
He nudged a box with his boot, and a puff of dust rose. “When was the last time you were down here?”
She paused. “A while. And I will not quantify that.”
