I licked my bottom lip and looked at his mouth.I really want to kiss him.He was so sexy and confident, it made my dick twitch again. “I was about to leave before you sat down.”
“I noticed,” he said, leaning close and speaking into my ear. “You’re sexy as hell, Kayden. I’m glad I got to you before you took off or someone else snatched you up for the night.”
I shook my head, heat rising to my cheeks as I fought a smile. “You’re a little ridiculous, you know.”
“Maybe you just underestimate your appeal.” Jace covered my hand with his. “Let’s go before you start to doubt that my interest is legitimate.”
How does he read me like that?
He whispered in my ear, “You spend a lot of time in your head, don’t you?”
I nodded, too consumed by the warmth of his breath on my neck to form words.
“What are you thinking right now?” he asked.
I hesitated. My brain swirled with thoughts and noise almost all the time. Most of the things I thought were too much to share out loud. Most people didn’t understand why I was worried about whether the bar glasses had been cleaned properly, where the emergency exit was, or if I’d already said the wrong thing and the person I was talking to was about to walk away. It was just one of the many curses my father’s abuse had bestowed upon me. It’s hardnotto develop generalized anxiety and believe the world is a dangerous place when the people who are supposed to protect you the most when you’re a kid decide to hurt you instead.
“You can tell me,” Jace said quietly, patiently. “I won’t judge you.”
I turned to meet his eyes. “I want to kiss you because I’m very attracted to you. But that’s probably too forward even for what thisclearly is, and if I kiss you and you change your mind about leaving, it will validate my fear that I’m not capable of picking someone up in a bar.”
Jace looked at my lips and leaned closer. “You’re very capable, and I’m going to kissyounow because I don’t want you to worry about it anymore.”
I opened my mouth to respond, to tell him that he didn’t have to take away the fear, that I could handle it. I’d had a decade of therapy to manage my own anxiety—not that I was going to draw attention to that detail tonight. Before I could say anything, Jace’s lips grazed mine in a whisper of a kiss, and the tingling down my spine had nothing to do with my anxiety and everything to do with arousal. I lifted a hand to his cheek, his facial hair rough in my hand, and pulled his mouth harder against mine, wanting to feel more of him. He deepened the kiss for just a moment before pulling back and smiling at me.
“Thank you,” I said.
He pressed one more gentle kiss to my lips. “You still want to take this somewhere more private?”
“Yes, please,” I said, standing up before I could find something else to worry about. Jace dropped cash on the bar and turned toward me, offering me his hand. I slid my fingers into his and tried to convince myself that the accelerated heart rate I was experiencing had nothing to do with my desire to impress this guy tonight and everything to do with excitement.
Who am I kidding? I want to impress the hell out of him, and I’m excited to do it.
Chapter Three
Olivia
I sighed as Isat down on the couch in my living room and pulled a blue throw blanket over my legs.
Despite Jace’s best efforts not to sugar-up my daughter, bedtime had still been a mess of overtired tears and wild-energy stores that I swore made toddlers act drunk. In fact, drunk people were easier to put to bed than overtired toddlers. I couldn’t wait to find a job with daytime hours and have Kaylee start preschool so we could establish some consistent schedules around here that didn’t involve relying so much on Mom and Jace for help or keeping Kaylee awake later than she really should be at her age.
I leaned forward and reached for the bowl of popcorn and the glass of wine I’d left on the coffee table and set the wine glass down on the handy little shelf on the arm of the couch that Jace had gotten me for my birthday earlier this year. According to him, I’d spill less wine if I wasn’t trying to balance it in my hands and text at the same time. Given that I’dmade a mess on the couch on three different occasions pre-shelf and zero times post-shelf, I had to acknowledge he’d been right.
I picked up the remote and started scrolling through the streaming options, looking for a movie to watch. I’d grown accustomed to spending my weekend nights with a bowl of popcorn, half a bottle of wine, and a rom-com playing quietly while Kaylee slept. For more than four years, this had basically been my life. I hadn’t been interested in dating when I was pregnant, then I was a single mom trying to take care of a newborn and I was too tired to even put on pants most days. For the last couple years, I’d wanted to be home with my daughter at night. She was my priority.
It hadn’t even been hard to adjust my lifestyle given that I’d seen my own mother do the same for me. My mom had been nineteen when she’d gotten pregnant with me and for my entire life it had been the two of us against the world. My dad was the kind of guy who’d breeze into town for a weekend and make me feel like the luckiest girl in the world, only to disappear for a year afterward. By the time I realized that cycle would likely continue my entire life, Mom and I had developed a sort of trauma bond from dealing with him. It wasn’t just me who got my hopes up every time he showed up—at least not the first dozen or so times that he did it. Eventually, she realized we were both better off without him. I hadn’t talked to him in years, and I had no interest in finding him now.
When I’d wound up pregnant at twenty-four after a one-night stand with a guy who breezed out of town the next morning, I knew trying to track him down would be a mistake. He’d made it clear he wasn’t sticking around even though our connection had transcended a normal one-night stand, and I wasn’t about to ask him to change his mind just because we’d been reckless enough not to use a condom.
Still, I was lucky I got Kaylee and not gonorrhea out of the experience. Instead, I channeled my mother’s strength, leaned on her and my friendship with Jace, and I made damn sure Kaylee had just as much love from me as I’d gotten from my mother.
I took a sip of wine, stopped scrolling on a new rom-com, and let the trailer play. Images of a Hollywood-hot man and woman filled the screen, quickly making it clear that this was a friends-to-lovers story about two people who’d been avoiding their feelings and were forced to acknowledge it when she got a job offer across the country. It looked cute, but my chest tightened just watching the trailer.Too real for me.
I closed my eyes and took a long sip of wine, thinking about how Jace had thrown out a job offer the minute I’d told him I was looking. Since the day I’d met him he’d done everything he could to make my life easier. If I needed an ear to vent to or a babysitter for a night out with one of my childless friends—who always seemed to be doing way cooler shit than me—or a night of pizza and wine with him, he was always there. And not once had he ever made a single move to ask me out romantically.
Sometimes I thought I caught him looking at me like he was interested in more, but then he’d blink away his attraction and I’d let out a breath, once again the single mom friend in his life who probably had way too much baggage for him to want to deal with. He was a millionaire with a job he loved and an endless rotation of meaningless flings. No way was he interested in starting a relationship with a woman and her child. But still, it was kind of cruel that he’d spent four years making me slowly fall in love with him only to leave me hanging. Not that he had any idea I felt that way.
Somedays I wanted to scream at him, “I want a date, you stupid idiot. I want you to wantmeone night, not the nameless people who traipse in and out of your life.” Other days I just wanted to shake up ourdynamic with an emotion-filled touch. We touched each other all the time, so how hard would it be to turn friendly touches into romantic ones?
