Chapter 11 #3
She could try, but she’d fail. He had a hundred pounds and a lot of muscle over her.
But she was determined and gutsy, and they might both end up going in.
“So, who do you think you saw?” he asked, keeping his tone neutral, choosing not to mention that Hadley saw the same apparition she did.
He didn’t believe, per se, in ghosts, but that was one hell of a coincidence.
“I don’t know, but it definitely wasn’t a ghost!”
He nodded. “A hallucination? Have you been dizzy lately? Seeing or hearing voices?” he asked, tongue in his cheek.
“No!” She slapped his thigh. “I don’t know who or what I saw, or what I imagined,” she muttered.
Dane chuckled at her mutinous face and lifted his hands when she scowled at him. “Okay, peace. So, tell me about the guy who spoiled my plans to take you home last weekend.”
Her head shot up, and her eyes collided with his. “You were planning on taking me home?”
Come on, that couldn’t be a surprise. “Well, I was going to start by kissing you and see where we ended up,” he said, enjoying the heat blooming in her cheeks and on her chest. Judging by the way she kept looking at his mouth, he thought he might’ve succeeded.
“Then why didn’t you call me during the week, ask me to dinner?” she asked, sounding confused.
That was easy to answer. “Because you needed some distance between what happened last Saturday and what’s going to happen between us.”
Her eyes didn’t leave his. “And something is going to happen between us?” she asked, her words little more than a whisper.
Fuck the future and keeping his distance. He was done fighting his attraction. “I hope so,” Dane quietly told her.
She nodded, her eyes on his lips. She leaned forward, and he gently pushed her away, but leaned close just until his mouth grazed her ear and he felt her shiver.
“I can’t shit on Tad and then kiss you,” he told her.
He was desperate to move just a little to the right, explore her mouth again, but this wasn’t the time and place.
Mostly because he currently had Tad’s level of control.
“I think the good residents of H-Town can handle a kiss,” Wren protested.
He loved that she seemed as desperate for him as he was for her.
“Not the way I want to kiss you, Wren,” he told her, leaning back to place his hand high on her leg and rubbing his thumb along the inside of her thigh, sighing at her soft, soft skin.
“And who says I only want to kiss your mouth? There are other places on your body I want to place my lips.”
She groaned, and when she tipped her head back, he saw her throat bobbing and her eyes closing, as if she were imagining him going down on her, the feel of his tongue on her sex.
His boardshorts felt tight across his crotch.
He cursed, low and slow. Removing his hand, he dragged it through his hair.
He started reciting the steps to a tracheotomy in his head.
When his heart rate dropped to below bursting-point levels, he cleared his throat.
“Tell me about the guy.”
Wren wrinkled her nose. “Way to kill the mood, Trafford,” she said on a loud sigh. Then she wrapped her arms around her bended knees and looked past his shoulder. “The empty boats are back,” she commented.
He looked over his shoulder and frowned. That was weird because, again, there was no wind. But empty floats drifting across the lake weren’t important. Returning to look at her, he waited. He was good at waiting, as his recent cold-shower-filled week showed.
“Alex has been, at certain points, my dance partner, my business partner—we’ve choreographed many dances together, done videos—my mentor, and always my friend. If we were free, we’d come to H-Town whenever we could.”
It was a while before Wren spoke again, and judging by her subdued tone, he knew she was finding it difficult. “When we were here the last time, something happened that caused me to think we had a shot at something … more.”
“You slept together,” he baldly stated, conscious of the acidic flare of jealousy deep in his gut.
She immediately shook her head, her hair flying across her cheek. “No, we got drunk and made out, got a little hot and heavy.”
“Who called a stop to it?” he asked past the razor blades in his throat. She had every right to sleep with anyone she chose, but…
“He did.”
Had the guy been drunk, blind, and stupid? Why hadn’t he taken what was on offer?
“Then what happened?” he prodded.
“We went back to New York, and we started working on a piece together. It was my choreo; he didn’t have any creative input. But he did help me refine it. It wasn’t part of a paying gig, simply my way of expressing my feelings for him.”
She sighed, looked down at her hands, and tried to smile.
“Anyway, he went to LA, we spoke every day, a few times a day, as we always did. We didn’t speak about what happened, but I kept …
hoping. Imagining. Projecting what would happen when he returned.
I was trying to work out how we could spend more time together, whether I should move in with him, or he with me. What we’d name our first kid.”
“While I was off in fantasy land, thinking we were no longer just friends, he was in LA, falling for a West Coast dancer.” She twisted the fabric of her cotton cover-up between her fingers.
“All our friends knew about her, but no one told me. He didn’t tell me either, not on any of our phone calls.”
Dane rubbed his jaw, wincing at the pain in her voice.
But she wasn’t done yet. “I went to pick him up from the airport, so damn excited to see him. And that’s when I saw them—him with this blonde.
Idiot that I was, I ran to him, and he greeted me as he always did, with a huge hug lifting me off my feet.
When he put me down, he wrapped his arm around me and introduced her as his girlfriend, me as his best friend.
My world … it just dropped out from under me. ” She fell silent, frowning.
“There’s more?” He knew it like he knew his own name.
“Mmm. The next time we were alone, I told him how I felt, but he said he wasn’t into me, and that he chose to be with Jess.
” She sighed, the sound thick with old hurt.
“And while he was in LA, he taught her my dance—my love letter to him—and someone filmed them.” Her shoulders lifted in a small, defeated shrug.
“It was posted online, it blew up, went viral, and suddenly the internet was calling it things like ‘love expressed through movement,’ and ‘how to say I love you without a single word.’”
Shit. Another viral video? The chances of having that happen once were miniscule, but twice? That seemed like a ton of bad luck.
“I felt like an idiot, so, so foolish.” Her voice cracked. “And betrayed.”
Seeing her pale face, he covered her hand with his, squeezing gently. As he knew, it was one thing to be rejected, but when rejection was served with a side dish of humiliation, it scorched. “What happened next?” he quietly asked.
“I acted as if nothing happened, but I started ducking his calls. I was asked to go to Seoul to choreograph a rising K-pop star’s music video.
It wasn’t a high-profile job, but it was good money, and it meant I would be out of the country for a while.
With him being busy with his own career and Jess, he didn’t communicate the way he used to, neither did I.
Our friendship slowly suffocated, and I was okay with it dying, thought that was how I needed it to be. ”