“Sure it was,” he commented, his voice sardonic, yet skipping along her nerve endings like fingers across a piano. “Is that why you don’t date?”
Bingo. “I date,” she fibbed.
“I’m not talking about our one dinner,” he clarified. “Some cocky bastard took advantage of you and now you’ve sworn off men. Is that it?”
Her pulse did that fluttering thing again, the one that had perspiration gathering in between her breasts and heat rolling into her cheeks. Stella wasn’t about to let him know how close to the truth he was. Her boyfriend from her dancing days, Rick, had swooped in with all his suave moves and charisma, making her heart pound. She hadn’t tried to resist Rick because he’d seemed like the real thing, giving her all sorts of promises for the future. Telling her he’d take care of her, that she could follow him anywhere. So she had, ignoring the warning bells in the back of her mind that she was following in her mom’s footsteps. Giving up everything for a guy who promised the world. And then Rick had abruptly ended their relationship, leaving her high and dry and picking up the pieces.
Brandon’s gaze roamed her face, touching on the heat flaming her cheeks and the heartbeat spinning out of control at the base of her throat. Her pupils were probably dilated too.
“What happened to you, Stella?” Brandon asked in a quiet voice. Throaty, making the moment feel intimate when she wanted to run in the other direction. Tell him to mind his own damn business, that he didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
When the truth was, she wanted to lean in to him. To unload the darkness she’d tried to bury but was still lugging around with her like an elephant on her back.
He could make it go away, that voice whispered. The one that sounded like her mother. The one that had pulled her to turn down her choreography job for a man.
“It’s nothing,” she whispered, because she couldn’t force her voice past the lump in her throat.
“I don’t think it’s nothing,” he argued. “I think something that makes you afraid of men is far from nothing.”
Her chin notched up. “I’m not afraid of men.”
“You’re just afraid of being intimate with one,” he corrected. “I’m not asking you to be intimate with me, Stella,” he went on without giving her a chance to object. “I’m just asking you to open up to me.”
But that was the thing. The two concepts were the same to her. It was an intimate matter that involved far more than just opening up to him. It meant exposing the real her, a person no one really knew. Who was nothing but a scared little girl, the antithesis of the person she’d forced herself to become in order to leave the ugliness behind.
His gaze dropped to her mouth, as though imagining what it would feel like to fuse them together. Her lips tingled just thinking about it.
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” he guessed.
She swallowed again, trying desperately to force that lump down. “No,” she whispered with a shake of her head.
He nodded, but the disappointment was all over his face, darkening his gorgeous brown eyes. “All right. I won’t force you to talk if you don’t want to. But there’s one thing you need to understand about me, Stella. I won’t get into a relationship with someone who holds herself back.”
She blinked and resisted the urge to run the tip of her finger across her lips, missing contact that wasn’t even there to begin with. “Relationship?”
“Just putting that out there,” he told her before taking a step back.
She shook her head. “Why—”
And then his hand was there. Gliding over her cheek, his big, rough palm cupping the side of her face with the gentleness of a lover’s caress. But instead of feeling seduced or manipulated by her own hormones, Stella felt…comforted. At ease with a man who knew better than to touch her. And what did that say, that he was willing to take the chance of being kneed in the balls?
That he cared.
Oddly enough, the only reaction in her overly sensitive body was the butterflies in her stomach. Followed by heat blooming across her midsection that matched the warmth flaring over her cheeks.
God help her, but she was turned on.
The urge to push him away had been replaced with the impulse to grab a fistful of his shirt. To tug his head toward hers so their breath could mix.
“Stella,” he finally said. “You might be able to hide from the rest of the world, but you can’t hide from me.”
“I’m not trying to hide from you,” she hedged.
His soft chuckle brushed across her heated skin. “Sweetheart, we’re playing the most erotic game of hide-and-seek I’ve ever seen.”
Is that what they’d been doing? Even as she denied it to herself, Stella knew Brandon was right. Ever since they’d met, the two of them had danced and circled each other like a couple of MMA champions. With neither of them willing to admit defeat. So they’d continue to dance and tug and pull until one or both of them relented.
And which one would that be?
It couldn’t be her. She was leaving in December.
Brandon’s brow crinkled. “What?”
Had she said that out loud?
He had her tied up in so many knots that now she was just blurting stuff out without thinking.
“I’m…going back to Chicago for a little while.” With nerves of steel, and ignoring all that inviting hardness his body was throwing around, Stella pulled away from him and ducked under his arm. She paced across the dance floor, the itch to dance away her stress pulling at her limbs. “I was offered a choreography job by my former artistic director.”
“I know,” he stated, his tone changing from the husky bedroom voice that had curled around her like a warm blanket to indifferent. Matter of fact. “Blake told me. And I can only assume Annabelle told him,” he answered.
Had his eyes gone flat?
“I swear I need a new best friend,” she muttered.
“So you’re leaving, then,” he said.
She folded her hands in front of her. Opened them, then refolded. “Only for a little while.”
He nodded, but the darkness clouding his eyes indicated he didn’t understand. “Until you decide not to come back,” he concluded.
“Why wouldn’t I come back?” Even as she asked the question, she knew the thought had entered her mind. More than once. How easy it would be to stay in Chicago, especially since the reason she’d come to Blanco Valley in the first place—her grandmother—was no longer relevant. But something had always held her back. Maybe it was the sense of stability she’d finally created for herself. Perhaps it was her students she’d come to love. Possibly it was the community itself, the people, the students, the atmosphere that was like living in a storybook. The snowy peaks that sheltered their little town. The yellow-leaved aspens that danced in the crisp air. Hell, even the Beehive Mafia was endearing, in their own camera-obsessed way.
“Aren’t you looking for a permanent position there?” he asked.