And then it happened.
She felt his presence behind her before he ever said a word. Jenna, the woman who could talk to anyone, anytime, had spent years fumbling for words and making atrocious attempts at flirting with the six-foot-two, dark-haired, mysterious specimen that was Peter Lacroux, but despite catching a few heated glances from him, she remained in the friend zone.
Regardless of how her body reacted to him, she didn’t need to beg for a man she could barely talk to, or follow after him like that adorable puppy snuggled against his powerful chest.
She was totally, utterly, done with him.
Maybe.
PETE EYED THE women from the Seaside cottage community, or the Seaside girls, as he’d come to refer to them, on his way across the street. They hadn’t spotted him watching them as they ogled the young construction workers from the patio of the Bookstore Restaurant. Pete had done the community and pool maintenance for the cottages at Seaside for about six years. He was a boat restorer by trade, but when he’d begun working at Seaside, his career hadn’t yet taken off. By the time word got around that he was an exceptional craftsman, he was too loyal of a man to stop doing the maintenance work. Besides, the girls were fun, and he’d become friends with the guys in the community, Tony Black, a professional surfer and motivational speaker, and Jamie Reed, who’d developed OneClick, a search engine second only to Google. And then there was Jenna Ward, the buxom brunette with the killer butt, a cackle of a laugh, and the most intense, alluring blue eyes he’d ever seen.
Frigging Jenna.
He watched her eyes shift to him as he neared the restaurant. Other than his craftsman skills, reading women was Pete’s next best finely honed ability—or so he thought. He could tell when a woman was into him, or when she was toying with the idea of being into him, but Jenna Ward? Jenna confused the heck out of him. She was confident and funny, smart, and too cute for her own good when she was around her friends. Just watching Jenna sent fire through his veins, but when it came to Pete, Jenna lost all that gumption, and she turned into a…Heck, he didn’t know what happened to her. She grew quiet and tentative when she was near him. Pete liked confident women. A lily to look at and a tigress in the bedroom. His mouth quirked up at the thought. He wasn’t a Neanderthal. He respected women, but he also knew what he liked. He wanted to devour and be devoured—and with Jenna, who swallowed her confidence around him, he feared his sexual appetite would scare her off. Besides, with his alcoholic father to care for, he didn’t have time for a relationship.
Jenna turned away as he stepped behind her. Her hair was longer this summer, framing her face in rich chocolate waves that fell past her shoulders. Pete preferred long hair. There was nothing like the feeling of burying his hands in a woman’s hair and giving it a gentle tug when she was just about to come apart beneath him.
He held Joey, the female golden retriever he’d rescued a few weeks earlier, in one arm, placed his other hand on the back of Jenna’s chair, and inhaled deeply. Jenna smelled like no other woman he’d ever known, a tantalizing combination of sweet and spicy. Her scent, and the view of her cleavage from above, pushed all of his sexual buttons, despite her tentative nature around him. But he had no endgame with Jenna Ward. No matter how much he wanted to explore the white-hot attraction he felt toward her, he respected Jenna and treasured her friendship too much to take her for a test ride.
“Hello, ladies.”
“Aww. Can I hold her?” Amy jumped to her feet and took the puppy from his hands. Joey covered her face with kisses.
“She’s a little shy,” Pete teased. He’d found the pup in a duffel bag by a dumpster behind Mac’s Seafood, down at the Wellfleet Pier. The poor thing was hungry and scared, but other than that, she wasn’t too bad off. The first night Pete had her, the pup had slept curled up against Pete’s chest, and they’d been constant companions ever since.
“Yeah, real shy. How’s she doing?” Leanna asked.
“She’s great. She sticks to me like glue.” He shrugged. “I was just coming over to get her a bowl of fresh water, maybe a hamburger.”
“Hamburger?” Leanna wrinkled her thinly manicured brow. “How about puppy food?”
“Puppies love burgers.” Chicks were so weird with their rules about proper foods. He glanced down at Jenna, whose eyes were locked on the table. She usually went ape over puppies, and he wondered what was up with her cool demeanor.
“Want to join us for a drink?” Bella slid a slanty-eyed look in Jenna’s direction.
He felt Jenna bristle at the offer. He should probably walk away and give her some breathing room. She obviously wasn’t herself today. He was just about to leave when Amy grabbed his arm and pulled him down to the chair beside Jenna. Great. Now Jenna had a death stare locked on Amy. Pete was beginning to take her standoffishness personally.
“Sit for a while. I want to play with Joey anyway.” When Amy met Jenna’s heated stare, she rolled her eyes and kissed Joey’s head.
“How’s the boat coming along?” Leanna Bray was a quirky woman, too. Her cottage had always been a mess before she met her fiancé, Kurt Remington. Every time Pete had gone by to fix a broken cabinet or a faucet, she’d had laundry piles everywhere, and sticky goo from her jam making seemed to cover every surface, including herself. Almost all of her clothing had conspicuous stains in various shades of red, purple, and orange. Kurt was as neat and organized as Jenna. He’d taken over the laundry and didn’t seem to mind picking up after Leanna. In any case, her place was much more organized these days.
“She’s coming along.” Pete had been refinishing a custom-built 1966 thirty-four-foot gaff-rigged wooden schooner for the past two summers. Working with his hands was not only his passion, but it was also cathartic. He’d spent the last two years pouring the guilt over his father’s drinking into refitting the boat.
“What will you do with it when you’re done?” Amy Maples looked like the girl next door, with her sandy blond hair and big green eyes, and acted like a mother hen, always worrying about her friends.
Pete shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll sail someplace far, far away.” He’d never leave his father, or the Cape, but there were days…
That brought Jenna’s eyes to him. She had the most gorgeous eyes. They weren’t sea blue or sky blue or even midnight blue. They were more of a cerulean frost, and at the moment, pointedly icy. What on earth did I do? He racked his brain, going over the last two weeks, but he hadn’t seen Jenna for more than a minute or two. He couldn’t imagine what he’d done to warrant her attitude.