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“Where are we headed?” he asked as we hit the main road, the ranch retreating behind us like a mirage.
“General store and Be Mine Bakery.” I sounded more businesslike than I meant to. I cleared my throat and did my best not to let on that the close vicinity and aloneness was becoming a little…suffocating. If suffocating was lust.
“Don’t you have an assistant for grunt work?”
“I have two executive assistants, Kira and Andrew, but they’re back in Boston. I don’t have a personal assistant.”
We were only a minute or so into the drive, the scenery going from wild to quaint in a blink: weathered white picket fences, flower baskets on every streetlamp, a woman walking four Corgis, when Damon abruptly asked, “How long were you and Kenny together?”
I stiffened. He didn’t say “your ex,” or “your old boyfriend,” just Kenny, as if the man were a leftover dish best cleared from a table. I felt my jaw set, involuntarily defensive, even though I owed the past nothing.
“In high school, four years. This last time, almost two.” I kept my voice neutral, but there was no way to disguise the faint note of humiliation in the words. I was not accustomed to failure, and my love life read like an actuarial table of relationship risks gone wrong.
He didn’t say anything, just made a little “hmm” noise in the back of his throat.
“What’s…hmm?” I pressed.
He shrugged, but his knuckles whitened slightly on the wheel. “Nothing, I just…don’t see it.”
“Don’t see what?”
“You two having anything in common.”
“Sometimes opposites attract,” I defended myself.
“Not when one of those opposites is a jackass.”
“Honestly, I think I was just lonely, and he was familiar,” I admitted for the first time, even to myself.
He glanced over at me, and I couldn’t quite read his expression.
“What?”
“There is something really wrong in this world if you are lonely. Men should be lining up to be with you.”
A forced laugh escaped me.
“I’m serious.” He stared into my eyes for a beat before turning his attention back to the road.
“I think some men are intimidated by successful women.”
“Only weak men,” he said as if it was obvious.
I shrugged. Since taking over as CEO of St. Claire Global, men had not been “lining up” to date me. If anything, it was the opposite.
We pulled up to the bakery, and I started to reach for my door, but Damon stopped me.
“Stay put.”
“I can open my own door,” I said, voice sharpened by the reflex of self-sufficiency, resenting the assumption that I couldn’t do something so basic myself—especially after years of orchestrating multimillion-dollar negotiations and overseeing a workforce that made the population of Valentine Bay look like a rounding error. But Damon’s hand stilled mine with a gentle but absolute pressure.
He met my challenge with that same steady intensity. “Not while I’m around,” he said, and his eyes—darker than I remembered, nearly black in the shifting light of the cab—unfurled something in my gut that was not altogether unpleasant.
Before I could muster a retort, he was already outside, striding around the hood. The driver’s side door swung open with a practiced flick of his broad hand, and I had the fleeting, mortifying sensation of being chauffeured by an old-fashioned bodyguard. I stepped down, my boots crunching over the gravel, and as soon as I hit the sidewalk, he fell into step beside me. There was a strange steadiness in his presence.
I had to admit, it did feel nice having someone else take charge. I was personally responsible for thousands of employees and their families. It was not something I took lightly. I tried not to think about it on a day-to-day basis, but it was always bubbling under the surface.
The front of Be Mine Bakery was painted in alternating candy stripes of cherry red and cream, as if the entire building were wrapped for Valentine’s Day year-round. A bell over the door tinkled as Damon opened it for me, and every head in the place swiveled toward us in unison—the same synchronized scrutiny I’d witnessed at boardroom tables, but with the added flavor of small-town nosiness.
