Chapter Twenty #2
Had he misread the signals? Moved too fast?
She looked as astonished as if he had suddenly sprouted wings and taken flight right out of the bookstore. Her eyes were wide,
lips slightly parted, a flush creeping up her cheeks. He had never seen anything more beautiful.
He held his breath, waiting for her reaction, terrified he’d crossed a line they couldn’t come back from.
“What was that?”
“I thought it was a kiss. A pretty great one, from my perspective.”
She looked dazed and aroused but he could see the softness beginning to give way to a kind of stunned annoyance.
“What the hell, Bryce. We’re friends. Why did you have to ruin everything by throwing sexy times into the mix?”
That kiss wasn’t even close to the kind of sexy times he wanted with her. Bryce took a ragged breath, his body hard and aroused.
“It was only a kiss. It’s not like we banged in the middle of the self-help section.”
Though he couldn’t help thinking he would have liked to do exactly that.
“Why? Just . . . why?”
He had to give her some kind of answer. His mind raced through a half-dozen excuses but he finally decided on the truth.
“Because I’ve wanted to do that since you came back to town.”
From the instant he first walked into the bookstore and found her, with her purple-tipped hair and her gorgeous tattoos and
all that attitude, he had wanted all of her, with a fierce, ever-present ache.
She glared at him. “Shut up. You have not.”
“Why does that seem so unbelievable to you?”
“Because I’m completely not your type.”
“Says who?”
“Me. That’s who.” Her eyes grew shadowed and she moved away from him, much to his deep regret.
“If you kissed me as some kind of sick joke, I’m not laughing.”
Would he ever be able to get away from his own past, when he had become the class clown to mask his own vast insecurities.
He had spent all of his school years trying to make everyone laugh. Especially Emma Lucas.
“Do I look like I find any of this funny?” he asked, his voice low.
She studied him and he couldn’t help wondering what she saw when she looked at him now.
Finally she looked away. “Whatever the reason, don’t do it again. I’m not . . . I don’t have time for this. We don’t have time for this. We have to work together for the time being, until this project is renovated. This kind of . . .
unnecessary distraction won’t accomplish anything.”
He could think of several things that kissing Emma might accomplish. Maybe he could finally get her out of his head, after
all this time.
Somehow he doubted it, though.
“Don’t kiss me again,” she repeated, as if he didn’t understand her the first time.
He felt his jaw tighten at her order. “Got it.”
He turned and went back to work, the thing he was best at. They were both silent as they cleared out the rest of the debris.
Only after they were both outside again, lights turned off, door locked and alarm set, did she finally speak.
“It was a great kiss, Bryce,” she finally said, avoiding his gaze. “I don’t want you to think I didn’t enjoy it.”
Was she trying to protect his feelings? Somehow that touched him almost as much as that kiss had. He wanted to kiss her again.
She had expressly asked him not to, though, which frustrated the hell out of him.
“Good to know,” he finally answered.
“And, okay, under other circumstances, I might be tempted to . . . you know.”
Yeah. He knew entirely too well.
“We can’t,” she went on before he could answer. “You and I are not right for each other.
“Emma, you don’t have to explain yourself. You don’t want me to kiss you. I won’t kiss you.”
“It’s not that I don’t want you to. I do. We just . . . can’t right now. Too much is at stake for me.”
Was she trying so hard to prove something to her mother or to herself?
“Whatever your reasons, I understand. I won’t kiss you again.”
“It sucks that you’re so decent.”
The disgruntlement in her voice almost made him laugh. “I’m . . . sorry?”
“You should be. You would be much easier to resist if you were the same person I thought you were in high school. Fun-loving, troublemaking Bryce. You’re not. You’re much more than that.” She paused. “I can’t afford any more mistakes and somehow, I suspect you would be a big one.”
He didn’t know whether to be flattered or hurt by that. He sighed. Did it matter? The last thing he wanted to do was make
her life more complicated.
“Point taken. Let’s forget it ever happened and move on to take care of the renovation.”
How long had he been focused on the job at hand? he wondered after he climbed into his pickup and headed toward home. Probably
since his dad left when he was ten.
He felt like he had been looking after his mom forever. In the old days, he had taken a job after school to pay some of the
bills, had cleaned her up after she would come home drunk, would go grocery shopping with whatever spare change he could scrounge
up.
Then, when he finally felt more stable, and she seemed to slow down her drinking and drug use, if not stopped it completely,
the early signs of dementia had begun to show. It had been easy to put them down at first as general forgetfulness, a side
effect from her years of hard living. But then, about four years ago, she had nearly burned down the house because she had
forgotten to turn off the oven, then claimed she hadn’t been the one to turn it on.
A week later, she had been given a nuisance citation for yelling obscenities at a couple of very young neighbor kids for simply
riding their bikes down the sidewalk. Police had urged a mental health evaluation and the diagnosis of a rare form of early
onset dementia had been shocking and heartbreaking.
The reminder of his mother did more than any of Emma’s words to him why kissing her had been a mistake.
She was right, as much as he didn’t want to admit it. Neither of them was in a good place for a relationship.
Right now, he needed to focus simply on his job, on making sure he did his best work possible on the bookstore renovation
to give Emma the chance she desperately needed to succeed.