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Moving around her, he climbed to his feet and began gathering their discarded clothes from the straw-strewn floor. She sat up and accepted her things when he handed them to her, taking her time putting bra and panties then her jeans and blouse back on.
She ran her hands through her hair, picking out pieces of straw and wishing for a brush to smooth the tangled mass. When she looked back at Mitch, he was dressed and just fastening his belt.
When he was finished, he slapped his hands against his thighs and fixed her with a lopsided smile. “Should we head down?”
She glanced around, surprised to find no visible signs of what had happened between them. After their explosive joining, she’d expected to see burn marks, singed straw, smoke still rising from the ashes. But, instead, there was just plain yellow straw, a little flat in places, but ordinary enough, and the litter of kittens curled up sleeping around their mother.
Turning back to meet his gaze, she nodded, then climbed down the ladder ahead of him.
Just as they reached the door of the barn, they heard tires crunching on the dirt and gravel drive, and saw headlights headed their way.
“That’ll be Pop,” she told him.
“Looks like we made it just in time.” He stuck his hands in the front pockets of his jeans, his thumbs hooked over his belt and waistband.
If he was nervous about coming face-to-face with her father only minutes after having her naked and writhing beneath him, he didn’t show it.
Her father pulled his pickup into the yard and cut the engine. A second later, the door opened and he climbed out.
He didn’t look completely steady on his feet, and she rushed forward to take his arm, hoping he’d kept his word about only finishing off that one last beer.
His head snapped up when he felt her hand on his elbow, and he smiled through his shaggy gray beard and mustache.
“Well, there you are. I thought you would have been in the house, asleep by now. What are you doing out here?”
“Mitch and I were just…um…”
“Checking the livestock,” Mitch offered, stepping out of the shadows of the barn and into the glow of the house’s front porch light.
“Good, good,” her father said. “Thanks for helping out my girl, Ramsey.”
Emma’s cheeks heated, but she hoped neither her father nor Mitch would notice in the dark.
“My pleasure, sir,” Mitch answered, rocking back on the heels of his well-worn boots, hands still in his pockets. “Anything else I can do for you tonight before I get going?”
“No, no, you go on.” Her father started toward the house, slipping out of Emma’s hold and looking more steady on his feet now that he’d had the chance to stand for a few minutes. “Have a good night. We’ll see you soon.”
“Yes, sir. Good night, sir.”
“Emma, I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“All right. ’Night, Pop. I love you.”
“Love you, too, sweetheart.”
The screen door slammed closed behind him and she waited several long seconds before speaking. Once she was sure he was out of earshot, she turned to face Mitch.
“Went a little overboard with the ‘yes, sir,’ ‘no, sir,’ ‘have a good night, sirs,’ didn’t you?”
She thought she saw him wince and bit back a chuckle of amusement.
“Maybe,” he answered shortly, his face a mask of inexpression. “But it sure beats the alternative.”
“What’s that?”
“Letting him know I spent the last half hour rolling around in the loft with his daughter.”
It was Emma’s turn to wince, and she cast a quick glance over her shoulder, afraid her father might have been close enough to overhear Mitch’s declaration.
She was a grown woman, so what she did with her body and with whom was no one’s business but her own. But talking about sex in front of her father—or worse, having him know she’d just finished having hot, extremely satisfying sex in his barn—was still something that made her keenly uncomfortable.
“Point taken.”
Gravel crunched beneath her feet as she crossed to him, then followed as he stalked to his truck.
“Thanks for your help with the horses and cattle,” she said.
He nodded, opening the door and climbing inside.
Watching him get ready to leave made her stomach clench. But what had she expected? That he would ask to stay the night or suggest they sneak back into the barn for seconds? That he would declare his undying love and fall to one knee, asking her to marry him?
She might harbor fantasies of happily-ever-after with him, but she wasn’t delusional. She was realistic enough to accept that sex was just sex, even if it had been with the one man she’d always secretly had a crush on.
“So I guess I’ll see you around,” she offered. The perfect opening for him to ask her out on a date, tell her he’d call, anything to imply that what had passed between them would be more than a one-night stand.
“Yeah,” he replied, and nothing more.
A beat passed before he started the engine, then turned his head to meet her gaze. “’Night.”
Forcing a smile to her lips, she swallowed back the bubble of disappointment swelling in her belly. “Right. Good night.”
He put the truck in gear, turned around and rolled slowly down the drive. She stood watching until his taillights disappeared, rubbing her arms to stave off a chill that centered in her chest and had nothing to do with the still night air surrounding her.
Three
Emma glanced at her shopping list. She had everything she needed except bread flour.
Turning down the baking aisle, she scanned the shelves for the brand and type she wanted, groaning when she spotted it on the uppermost shelf. The store had apparently rearranged items since the last time she’d purchased bread flour. And at five foot three, that left it just a couple of inches out of her range.
Pushing her cart to the side, she used the toe of her shoe to nudge cans of pie filling on the lowest shelf out of the way, then grabbed hold of a shelf at waist level and hoisted herself up. Her fingertips brushed the front of the bag, but she still couldn’t get a good enough grip to lift it down.
“Need some help?”
With a yelp, her hold on the shelf slipped and she fell backward. Strong hands and an even stronger chest caught and steadied her.
She turned, looking up into Mitch’s hard, gray eyes. Not that she’d needed to see him to know who’d spoken to her. She would know his voice anywhere.
“Hey,” she greeted him, feeling slightly out of breath, and not because of her graceless pirouette from the grocery store shelves.
It had been two weeks since the Fourth of July picnic, since that night in the barn. Two weeks without seeing or even hearing from him again.
She hadn’t been surprised. She would have been more surprised if he’d called or shown up on the doorstep, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t disappointed.
Disappointed that he could walk away without a backward glance after what they’d shared but also that their sleeping together might have ruined a perfectly good, lifelong friendship.
And now here he stood, staring at her from beneath the rim of his black Stetson. He didn’t seem particularly pleased to see her, but then Mitch hadn’t looked happy since Suzanne had left. A thin layer of stubble shadowed his square jaw, and lines bracketed his flat mouth.
“Hey, yourself. Is this what you were after?” He reached up with one hand and plucked a bag of bread flour from the top shelf with ease, holding it out to her.
She took it, cradling the five-pound weight to her chest while she swallowed and tried to think of something witty to say to break the tension and attempt to return them to the easy camaraderie they’d shared before sex had muddied the waters.
“You headed somewhere after this?” he asked without preliminaries.
“Just home to put groceries away,” she answered.
“Got time for a cup of coffee? Maybe a bite to eat?”
She glanced over her shoulder into the basket of her cart. Nothing cold. Nothing that would go bad if she didn’t go straight home.
Her stomach gave a little lurch at the possibilities of what he might want to talk about, but she nodded. “I guess that would be all right.”
“Good. Need anything else?”
She checked her list one last time, then shook her head. “No, I’m ready.”
They moved down the aisle together, Emma pushing the cart as Mitch followed a step behind. The heels of his boots clicked rhythmically on the hard, tiled floor, matching the nervous beat of her heart.
He stayed with her while she went through the checkout line, then helped to carry the bags to her car.
“Where are we going?” she asked, standing in the open driver’s side door.
“Rosie’s Café.” He tipped his hat down a fraction to shield his eyes from the midday sun. “I’ll meet you over there.”
Ten minutes later, they were seated across from one another in a red vinyl booth near the back of the café. Located in the center of town, Rosie’s was Gabriel’s Crossing’s most popular restaurant. A greasy spoon where folks came for home cooking and the latest gossip.
The lunch crowd had cleared out already, and dinner customers wouldn’t begin to trickle in for a few more hours. When the waitress came, they asked for pie and coffee, then sat in uncomfortable silence while the young woman went to fill their order.
Emma folded and refolded her napkin until the paper edges began to flake and fall away. Finally, she took a deep breath, laid her palms flat on the Formica tabletop, and faced Mitch head-on.
“So, what did you want to talk about?” she blurted out, deciding it was better to simply come to the point than sit here imagining worst case scenarios. Like tearing off a Band-Aid in one quick swipe rather than toying and tugging and prolonging the agony.
“Us.”
As much as she’d braced herself for his answer, she hadn’t expected that.
She waited until the waitress set slices of pie and steaming cups of black coffee in front of them before responding, using the much-needed time to calm her erratic pulse and get her scattered thoughts in order. He took a sip of black coffee while she stirred a sugar packet and dollop of cream into hers.
Once they were alone, she took a deep breath and kept her tone low so no one would overhear. “What about us?”
“I think there should be one.”
She knit her eyebrows. Mitch had never been the easiest man to talk to, but at the moment he was giving new meaning to the word confusing. “One what?”
“Us. I think there should be an us.”
Picking up his fork, he dug into his slice of blueberry pie as though they were talking about the weather instead of…them.
Before she could reply, he swallowed and went on. “You know what happened between us, Emma. It shouldn’t have. It shouldn’t have happened the way it did, and for that I’m sorry.”
The flush of embarrassment she’d felt at his mention of the night they’d made love flared into sudden anger and more than a little hurt.
How dare he apologize to her for what she considered one of the most special nights of her life? If he was sorry, if he regretted what they’d done, then he should have kept it to himself instead of cornering her like this.
“That’s what you brought me here to tell me?” she demanded, her knuckles turning white as she clutched the edge of the table. “You’re sorry we slept together? I hate to break it to you, Mitch, but you’re not the first man I’ve had sex with. You didn’t seduce me, you didn’t take my virginity, you didn’t do anything that requires an apology. I’m a big girl. I can make my own decisions and sleep with whomever I want. I don’t need your permission or your approval.”
A beat passed while he held her gaze, then he nodded. “You’re right. You can make your own decisions.”
He took another bite of pie and washed it down with a gulp of coffee. “The thing is, I’m not the type to have a one-night stand with a neighbor and childhood friend. It feels…sleazy.”
Her eyes narrowed in warning. He wasn’t calling her sleazy or even what had passed between them, she knew that. But it was a close thing, and in her current mood she wasn’t sure she was willing to split hairs.
“My point is,” he continued, “I think maybe we should keep seeing each other. See where it leads.”
Of all the things he might have said, that shocked her the most. It also made her heartbeat—which had slowed to a crawl at the direction the conversation was taking—speed up and thump against her rib cage.
She swallowed hard, praying she wasn’t hearing things. “Excuse me?”
“I think we should…date. Go out a couple of times and see what happens.”
It was half-true, anyway. But the suggestion wasn’t driven by interest as much as nobility. And, he admitted, guilt.
In the two weeks since the Fourth of July picnic…since they’d made love in the loft of her father’s barn…he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her.
Partly because the sex had been incredible and every fiber of his being wanted to be with her again. And partly because she was his neighbor, a friend since childhood. They’d gone through school together. Climbed trees and ridden horses together. Survived the prom and graduation and the death of a parent—her mother, who had been a second mother to him as well—together.
She wasn’t some casual acquaintance to be used to slake his lust. Even if it had been four long, lonely years since he’d been with a woman.
So far, this was the best solution he could come up with. His personal code of honor wouldn’t allow him to just walk away and pretend that night had never happened. That might be all right for a stranger he’d met in a bar, but he couldn’t treat Emma that way.
Emma deserved better.
Using her for a one-night stand was unacceptable. But dating her for a while wasn’t.
Nothing would come of it, he knew. Nothing could ever come of it, and he didn’t want it to. But if they dated for a while and then split up, he could justify having slept with her.
And he wouldn’t sleep with her again, that was a promise.
Even if the memory of kissing her, touching her soft skin, heated his blood and tightened his trousers across his groin.
