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“Eat dinner together?”
She lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. “Be engaged.”
“Ah. That.” He speared a bite of steak as cold trepidation seeped into his veins.
“I think it would be best for both of us if we set some boundaries.”
He chewed his steak, swallowing it without tasting it. “Name them.”
She seemed thrown by his agreement, which shouldn’t have bothered him, but it soured in his stomach. “Okay,” she said, dragging out the second syllable. “First, we have to be honest with each other. Completely.”
“I’ve never lied to you.”
“Being honest isn’t just about not lying.”
He dipped another bite of steak in the eggplant puree, his jaw tight with frustration. “Pretty sure that’s the textbook definition, Kat.”
“It’s also about not keeping things from each other.”
He raised his eyes to hers, heart pounding in his chest. The stubborn set of her mouth and slight flare of her nostrils set his nerves on edge, a decade’s worth of old wounds stinging beneath the surface. All the things he should have told her back then like a tangible thing between them. And the hell of it was, he wasn’t sure he’d do it any differently, even now, even knowing what it had cost him.
“What else?” he asked.
“No seeing other people.”
He huffed out an incredulous laugh. “Not a problem.”
“All it would take is one person to post a picture on social media and this all will be for nothing.”
His voice was a raw scrape up his throat. “I said it’s not a problem.”
Her eyes narrowed as she assessed him, but whatever she saw there seemed to mollify her. It rankled that she even had to ask, that she thought there was any chance he would embarrass her like that. That she still didn’t trust him.
You haven’t given her any reason to trust you.
She took a long sip of her water, and Beckett watched as her throat worked, the condensation on her glass beading beneath her fingertips. She set her glass back down, her fingers lingering on the delicate stem, eyes focused there rather than on him.
“No touching. Unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“Define necessary,” he grated out.
“Like today, for the photos. That was necessary.”
“Because someone was watching.”
“Exactly.”
“But I can’t touch you when we’re alone.”
“I don’t see why you would need to.”
“Not even to help you out of the car.”
“A helping hand isn’t—”
“What about when you wrap yourself around me in the middle of the night? Does that violate your no touching rule, too?”
Her mouth opened and closed uselessly, shock and embarrassment painting her features the same color as those watermelon mountains. He shouldn’t have said anything. He wanted her to wrap herself around him. But he couldn’t help the petulant jab from his wounded pride. Christ, he’d spent the last decade dreaming of touching her again and she… clearly hadn’t.
