“Stop what?” she retorted, her hands going to her hips. She tossed her head, and, despite being embarrassed, just managed to hold his hot gaze.
“Whatever you are thinking, you’re wrong,” he told her. He took out a paper napkin from the front pocket of his shorts and started wiping her sticky fingers. Not wanting to touch him—okay, she did, but she’d rather stab herself in the eye with a hot poker than let him know that!—she snatched it out of his hand and wiped her thumb, giving the task far more attention than it deserved.
“Are you a mind reader now?” She lifted her chin and nodded to Madam Calliope’s psychic shop across the road. “Maybe you should ask her for a job.”
He tipped up her chin with his thumb and index finger and forced her to look at him. “Wren,” he warned.
She jerked her head away. He didn’t speak, and she pushed an agitated hand through her hair. “If you’re just going to stand there like an oversized statue, let me pass.”
He folded his arms and widened his feet. “I didn’t kiss you because we were in the middle of the road. Your godmother was about twenty feet from us, watching us; Hayes, too. Tad and his cronies were five feet away, and I could name another ten people in the general vicinity.”
“I also can’t help remembering that, just a week ago, you pulled back and ran away like your pretty ass was on fire.”
She twisted her lips and looked away. Okay, fair point.
“Wren, when I kiss you, and Iamgoing to kiss you, preferably sometime soon, it’s only going to be when you are ready to take this to its natural,adultconclusion. And it won’t be with half the town watching. And probably commenting.”
It took a while for his words to sink in, for him to make sense. She hadn’t noticed anybody else; her entire focus had been on him. Unlike her, he’d been conscious of the world around him.
“I was a soldier before I was a doctor, Wren. Situational awareness is part of my DNA,” he explained. How did he always seem to know what she was thinking? It was a little reassuring, and alotannoying.
Right. She huffed out a sigh and then remembered that he’d said that he intended to kiss her sometime soon, and without an audience. Heat flared once again.
“If you’re going to look at me like that, I’m going to say to hell with it and go for it,” he warned her. “Don’t blame me if it’s the main topic of conversation at Spirited Grounds or at the bookshop tomorrow morning.”
Right. Town gossip. As well as discussing their relationship, she didn’t put it past the town to rate their kiss and score it for entertainment value and skill. Wren’s shoulders slumped. Dane was right, damn him.
“Are we good?” he asked.
She sighed and nodded. She still felt like a fool, but not as much as she did before. Thinking that she didn’t want any crossed signals—something she’d mastered the art of with both Alex and Kyro, but in opposite ways—she rubbed the back of her neck.
“Okay, so it’s pretty obvious I’m attracted to you,” she said, keeping her voice low. She swallowed and waited for his nod. “And you are to me, right?”
“Very.”
She appreciated his quick, brief answer. “Okay. Um … I’m not sure how far we’ll go, or where we’ll end up?—”
“Hopefully in bed,” he stated, still calm. Still so very steady.
Wren held up her hand. “But maybe I should tell you that if that does happen, and I’m not saying it will, there’s no possibility of it going any further. I’m not interested in a relationship.”
He looked at her for a long, long time, his expression inscrutable. “At all?”
Wren shook her head. “At all.” She cleared her throat. “If you are, then maybe you should…” She couldn’t finish her sentence; hell, she could barely handle the thought of him with anyone else.
“This isn’t about wanting sex. It’s about wantingyou.” Dane slid his hands into the pockets of his shorts, a tiny frown pulling his eyebrows together. “But since we’re both only in H-Town for the summer, not looking for more makes sense.”
It did, of course it did. But despite being happy he was on the same page as her, she rocked on her heels, feeling disconcerted. Part of her wanted to take his hand and ask him to take her home, but a bigger part of her wasn’t that brave. When Dane just looked at her, she swayed from side to side. How could he be so calm while she felt so off-balance? “I don’t know what to do,” she admitted. “Or say.”
A small smile touched his lips. “Why don’t we carry on walking down the street and maybe grab a drink in the beer garden?” he suggested. “And if you buy me a drink, I might be persuaded to get onto the dance floor with you.”
She winced. “Oh God, do you have to?” she whined, teasing him.
He lightly pinched her waist. “As my dance teacher, you should be encouraging, not dissing me,” he told her.
Wren grinned, felt the buzz coming from her back pocket, and pulled out her phone to see Poppy’s name on her screen. She swiped to answer and lifted it to her ear. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Benji left earlier for a last-minute boys’ weekend with his golfing buddies, so I, impulsively, hopped in my car and headed your way. I want to eat my body weight in ice cream. Plus, I need to offload some stuff about the wedding.”
