Instead, she smiled at him, though the edges of it felt cracked and artificial. “I think you’ve been chivalrous enough today. I can open my own door.”
He laughed at her, then his eyes went wide. “Oh! That reminds me.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out her license, flipping it expertly over the roof of the car. Keira caught it as it sailed toward her.
“Nice reflexes.” He gave her an approving nod.
She shrugged. “Nice throw.” They climbed into the car. “So, let me guess. You played Little League?”
“Nope,” Walker said. “No baseball. I’ve always preferred card tricks.”
“Like, ‘pick a card, any card’?” Keira asked. As the wet pavement of the street slipped beneath the car’s tires, Keira felt herself start to relax.
“Exactly. I don’t do them much anymore, but my fingers still have a feel for it.”
“Muscle memory,” Keira said.
Walker cocked his head to one side. “That’s precisely what it feels like.”
“That’s what it is. The technical term for it. It’s part of piano playing too—how your fingers know where to go to hit a major seventh, or how far to stretch for the D-below-middle-C key.”
“Ironic.”
She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “Ironic? How?”
“That’s what always kept me from being able to play an instrument. I would be looking at the notes on the page and my fingers would freeze.” He looked over at her, the gray of his eyes soft—honest. “I hated it. I could see the music—I could hear it, even, in my head. But I couldn’t make my hands do what they were supposed to do. It was so frustrating.”
“That’s how I feel when I try to do pretty much anything besides playing the piano,” she admitted.
“This is the whole ‘I draw like a three-year-old’ thing, isn’t it?” he asked. The teasing was gentle.
Keira laughed. “Yeah. But that’s not the only thing. I had a seriously bad incident involving juggling in the eighth grade. I gave the gym teacher a black eye.”
Walker turned the car onto the highway. “Your laugh is gorgeous,” he said.
The compliment blazed across the skin of her neck, making her insides molten.
“Um—thanks,” she stammered, staring out at the highway markers that flew past her window. “Where are we going, anyway?”
Walker glanced over at her. “We could go get coffee. Or . . . there’s this other place. I love to go there when it’s foggy like it is today. But it’s all the way down by the coast. And it’s up a pretty decent climb. I don’t know if you’d be up for it.”
The challenge in his words made the idea irresistible to Keira. A little voice in the back of her head said that Walker had known it would do exactly that.
“I don’t think my parents are going to care if I’m gone for a while.” Her voice was bitter. It was the closest she’d come to mentioning the death spiral of her parents’ marriage. It was the closest she thought she could come to mentioning it.
Without taking his eyes off the road, Walker nodded. “I know what you mean.”
His parents were gone—she couldn’t even imagine how much worse that would be than having parents who didn’t love each other. Part of her wanted to say something, to cluck and sympathize, the way the other girls at school would have. But she knew that if she did, the wall he’d been taking down, brick by brick, would go flying up again in an instant. It was exactly what Keira would do, in the same situation. So she kept her hands folded in her lap and stared down at her feet.
“Well, I’m glad I wore my boots,” she said.
Walker turned to look at her, his face lit with a deadly sexy grin.
“Me too.” Hitting the accelerator, he slung an arm around the back of her seat, not touching Keira, but close enough that she could feel the heat of him against her neck.
She still wondered what the hell she was getting herself into, but the reproach was gone. The only thing left in its place was a tingling excitement.
Chapter Thirteen
KEIRA STARED OUT AT the jagged pile of rocks. The muddy green-gray of the waves crashed against the spit of land like they wanted to pull the rocks down into the sea. The thin, empty-sounding cry of the seabirds wheeling overhead made her quiver. She didn’t like seagulls. When she was five, one had dive-bombed a sandcastle she was building, spraying sand in her face. Her dad said it was only trying to get the mussel she’d used as a flag, but that hadn’t made the sand in her eyes sting any less.
“That’s not good.” Walker frowned at her, and Keira felt her stomach drop.
“What?” She wrapped her arms around herself. The wind coming off the ocean cut straight through her sweater. The sooner they started climbing the rocks, the sooner she’d warm up a little.
“You’re not wearing a coat,” he said. “It’s cold out here.”
She shrugged. “I’ll be fine as soon as we start moving.”