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Her chin tilted, but her eyes wouldn’t meet his.
“Why? So you can make fun of me some more?”
“I wasn’t.”
She didn’t answer. The way her soft lips twisted was answer enough.
He frowned. The bones in her elbow felt fragile. He slid his hand up her arm, curving around the taut flesh, feeling the flex of healthy muscle. Of skin that was smooth as satin against his fingertips. “I have to go back to Paris after the wedding.”
She blinked. Hesitated. “Congratulations.”
“It’s business,” he dismissed. “I travel a lot.” Too much, he thought vaguely. “I’m not going to be here for long. Why won’t you have dinner with me? I’m harmless.”
Hope’s lips parted and she looked down at his fingers circling her arm. Harmless? Hardly. This man was built for harm. Harm of the heart. “I don’t—”
“Want steak. That’s okay. Pizza, then.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Man’s gotta eat.” He didn’t smile. “Woman’s gotta eat, too. What’s your favorite food?”
She frowned. “Chinese. I don’t—”
“We’d have to drive a ways to get that.”
His thumb swirled against her arm. She looked up at him. “Tristan—”
“Maybe I like the way you say my name.”
Her throat knotted. Shivers crept down her spine and broke out on her arm where he would surely feel them. He probably thought she was insane standing there shivering in the warm early evening. “I’m a mess from this afternoon,” she whispered thoughtlessly.
Tris looked at her lips. They were perfectly sculpted, impossibly soft-looking. Everything about her was soft. Her voice, her eyes, her skin. “Take a shower,” he murmured. “I’ll wash your back.” He wasn’t entirely joking, he realized. But he grinned, trying to look harmless despite his thoughts which were miles away from harmless.
“Colbys,” she said abruptly, tugging her arm out of his grasp. “It’ll be a zoo at the pizza place. I’ll meet you there in a half hour.” Then she hastily stepped into the house and shut the door right in his face.
Tris stared at the closed door. “I’ll be damned,” he murmured. Then he laughed softly, feeling better than he had in weeks, and turned around on her postage-stamp-sized porch. Across the street, the park stretched out, vibrantly green. The high school looked the same as always. And down the street and around the corner was the old elementary school. Where, among her students, shy Hope would laugh and smile and teach.
Too bad he’d be long gone from Weaver by then. He’d have enjoyed seeing Hope in her element.
He’d just have to figure a way in the next few days to get her to look him in the eye with those incredible eyes of hers. To scale that mile-high shyness of hers so that when he kissed her—he wasn’t sure when he’d decided it was something he was going to do—she wouldn’t run away.
She’d kiss him back.
The kiss was definitely something he looked forward to. Probably more than was good for either of them. But it would be just a kiss. What would be the harm in that?
Chapter Three
“Would you like wine?”
Beneath the cover of the varnished wood table top, Hope’s fingers twisted together. “No, thank you.” She didn’t drink. Hadn’t ever had a hangover, just as he’d said earlier.
She watched Tristan, who sat across from her in the dimly lit booth. He showed no surprise that she’d declined the drink. Of course he wasn’t surprised.
The only surprise was that she was sitting here in Colbys, which served food but which everyone still considered a bar, with Tristan Clay. Hope had been to Colbys dozens of times in her lifetime. Never once had the booths seemed so cramped. So shadowy. So intimate.
Tristan was reading the menu he held open between his hands. His fingers idly tapped the corner of the padded vinyl folder and Hope closed her eyes for a moment before focusing on her own menu. She shifted and her knee bumped something solid and immovable beneath the table. It wasn’t the table. It was him. She quickly angled her knees away from his and stared blindly at the menu. What was she doing here?
“Decided yet?”
She looked up as Tristan closed his menu and sat back in the booth. “Excuse me?”
His eyebrow peaked. “Do you know what you want to order?”
She nodded and shut her menu with a snap. She didn’t. But she wasn’t going to sit there like an idiot staring at words that her distracted mind wouldn’t read. She chewed at the inside of her lip. Rearranged her flatware and drained her water glass.
He closed the menu and set it to the side of the table, folding his arms over the surface of the table. He seemed suddenly to loom over her from his side, but the portion of her brain that still functioned knew it only seemed that way because he was so tall and his shoulders so wide that he easily filled more than half of the bench on his side of the booth.
A fact that did nothing to prevent her from pressing her spine more firmly against the seat behind her. Or from reaching for the chain at her throat and running an inch of it back and forth between her thumb and forefinger.
His gaze was unwavering, but she was certain that he wanted to smile. She felt her entire body go hot with embarrassment. She dropped her hand to her lap.
She wished that Newt Rasmusson, the owner of the place, would hurry up and take their orders—despite the fact that she didn’t know what she wanted—so at least that interruption would draw Tristan’s focus away from her.
“Want to dance?”
The jangle that shot through her was not a leaping, internal YES! It simply wasn’t. “No one is dancing,” she pointed out faintly. Her fingers sought the chain necklace once again.
“So?”
“There’s no music.”
He glanced down at the table. “If you don’t want to, Hope, just say so.”
“I didn’t mean—”
His lashes lifted and she saw, then, the amusement there. Her lips tightened and she angled her chin up a notch. She gathered up her purse and started to slide from the bench. No matter how breathless she became just from looking at him, she wasn’t going to sit there and be his evening’s entertainment. He’d already found more than enough about her to tease. “This was a bad idea,” she said aloud. Her voice shook, but at least she’d spoken up. “Thank you for the ride back to town earlier.”
Without looking his way, she hurried toward the entrance, bumping her hip against an empty table as she went. She tugged the strap of her shoulder bag higher on her shoulder and blinked rapidly. She pushed through the door, nearly crying with relief when she made it out onto the street without embarrassing herself even more than she already had.
Though how that would be possible, she couldn’t be sure. “Idiot,” she muttered under her breath. She drew in a long breath and started down the street in the direction of her house. It wouldn’t take but a few minutes to walk. No longer than it would have taken her to walk to Colbys in the first place if Tristan hadn’t been sitting on her little porch when she came out, ready to drive them despite her assertion that she’d meet him there.
“I guess you weren’t hungry, after all.”
She whirled, her braid flying. Her lips parted, but no words came. And that frustrated her even more. She shook her head and turned again, but Tristan caught her arm. His fingers circled her elbow; not tightly, but with enough insistence that she stopped again. Or maybe it was the tingling heat spreading out from her elbow along the rest of her arm. Her voice broke free. “Tristan, don’t.”
He stepped in front of her, oblivious to the two cars that slowly drove down the main street. His shoulders blocked the red glow of the setting sun. “Am I so objectionable that you couldn’t stand one more minute of my company?”
Her fingers curled around her purse strap. “I don’t like being laughed at.”
“Nobody does, sweet pea.” He let go of her elbow and brushed his thumb over her white knuckles. “The only one I was laughing at was myself,” he said quietly. “Please. Come back in and have dinner with me. I won’t ask you to dance if you don’t want me to, but I can’t promise not to try talking you into a game of pool.”
She didn’t want to be charmed by him, knowing how easily he could accomplish it. Was accomplishing it. “What about Drew Taggart?” she asked, faintly desperate.
“What about him?”
“You wanted to look him up.”
“I’ll catch up to him later. There’s plenty of time.”
“But you told Jaimie—”
“You’d have been racing down the road with her at the wheel if I’d just told you, flat out, what my reasons were for offering you that ride.”
He didn’t wear boots like most of the men in Weaver did. Not cowboy boots nor heavy work boots. He wore scuffed athletic shoes. She stared at them so fiercely that she spotted the tiny place at the toe of one shoe where the leather had begun to wear through. “And what were they? These reasons that would terrify me so?”
“I’ll tell you, but you have to look at me first.”
Her cheeks heated. She darted a look into his face.
He tsked, and she jumped when he tucked his knuckles under her chin and lifted it. Nervousness knotted in her chest. “I’m looking at you.”
“At my chin,” he murmured. He touched the nose piece of her glasses, inching them back up her nose, and surprise lifted her gaze to his for the briefest of moments.
But it was long enough for her to be caught, unable to pull her gaze from his. They were so blue, his eyes. As if a midnight sky had been trapped in his irises. She suddenly felt warm, her senses trapped in some odd time warp where everything moved slowly. She didn’t even blink when he took a step closer, wrapping his other hand around her free elbow. Her hands brushed his hips and she pulled them back, clasping them together against her chest.
“That’s why,” he murmured.
His thumb was doing that maddening swirl-thing on her elbow. “I d-don’t know.”
“Yes, you do, Hope.”
“No—”
“Don’t be afraid of me.”
“I’m…not.” She swallowed. “I’m not.”
“You’re trembling.”
“I—”
“So am I.”
“Stop this. You’re making fun. You told your brother you weren’t interested in me. I overheard you.”
“I’m interested all right,” he murmured.
She shook her head abruptly. Her protest was as ineffectual as her mushy resistance when he drew his fingertips along her forearms, capturing her hands. He pressed her palms to his chest. And, oh God, she felt his heart. Thundering through the fine cotton of his Hawaiian print shirt as fiercely as her own heart pounded.
“You’re doing that to me, sweet pea.” His soft words stirred the loose tendrils of hair at her temples. “You have been since the coffee in the cafе. Maybe I didn’t see that it was any of my brother’s business, but that doesn’t mean it’s not so.”
“No.”
“Yes. That’s why I was laughing at myself. I come home expecting nothing but enduring my old man’s long-awaited wedding, and find myself meeting a teacher whose violet eyes could make me forget my own name.”
She felt his breath on her forehead, then closed her eyes and held back a gasp when his warm lips touched her temple. Her fingers curled against his chest, grabbing loose fabric. “We’re standing on Main Street.”
His jaw grazed hers, then he lifted his head, untangling her fingers from his shirt front. “If it bothers you, come back inside with me and have dinner.”
“You said you were harmless. I knew you were lying.” She frowned as another car pulled along the street and turned into the parking lot behind her. “What do you want with me?”
He laughed abruptly. “Are you kidding?”
“You used to date Serena Stevenson.” She pushed out the words.
His eyes narrowed. “So? It was a long time ago.”
“She’s a famous model!”
“Who is now happily married with two kids, neither of whom are mine, thank the good Lord. What’s your point?”
“My face has never stopped traffic.”
“That’s because you’ve probably always been in Weaver where there is no traffic.” He let go of her hands and took a step back. The cool fingers of the evening air slipped between them and Hope shivered.
She hadn’t always been in Weaver and she knew good and well that guys who looked this good didn’t seek out Hope Leoni because of her physical attributes. Only she couldn’t for the life of her think what Tristan hoped to gain by pursuing this.
Which brought her squarely back to the assumption that he was merely amusing himself. His heart may have seemed to thunder in tempo with hers. But in all likelihood it had just been her muddled senses. Which were quickly clearing again, thank goodness.
“I think you should go see Drew,” Hope suggested. “He and Jolie are building a place a few minutes outside of town. I watch their little boy on—”
“Good evening, Hope. Tristan. I’d heard you were back. For the wedding, I presume?”
Hope looked desperately at the sidewalk underneath her feet, wishing it would open up and swallow her. But it stayed dismayingly solid. She wrapped her hands once more around her purse strap and turned around to face Bennett Ludlow, the head of the school board. The man had left his parked car and stood on the sidewalk behind them.
“Yes,” Tristan said abruptly, barely sparing the other man a glance. “I’ll drive you home, Hope.”
His hand touched the small of her back, igniting a warm, melting glow.
“You mean you two were here together?” Bennett’s white teeth smiled, but Hope knew the older man too well not to see the wheels clicking inside his brain. He was undoubtedly wondering the same thing Hope was. Why?
“Not really,” Hope answered quickly. “And I think I’ll walk home. It’s such a lovely evening.” She didn’t dare look up into Tristan’s face again. Every time she looked into his eyes, her sensible brain simply ground to a halt. And the last thing she needed was to look as muddled as she felt with Bennett there to witness it.
She wondered if she’d ever be able to forget that she’d been hired last year as a last resort because no other more qualified teacher had been available.
She smiled vaguely at both men and hurried across the street.
“She’s not your usual type, is she, old boy?”
