When the bill came, he tried to pay, and she playfully smacked his hand away and reminded him that it was a thank-you dinner for the skylight that had almost killed him. If a skylight had almost killed her, well, then he’d be welcome to pick up the check.
He walked her out to her car, and she didn’t want to get into it and drive away. She wanted to stay with him, even if they were doing nothing. Even if he were going to the post office or the DMV, even if he were planning to clean out the rain gutters. She just wanted to be with him.
“It’s still early,” he said. “Do you want to take a walk?”
“Sure.”
He reached out to her, and she put her hand in his. They walked down Burton Drive and then, because the full moon lit up the night well enough that they could easily see their way, they climbed the stairs that led up a woodsy, fern-covered hill to the Cambria Pines Lodge. They opened a little white gate and entered the lodge’s gardens, a fantasy world of manicured hedges, heirloom rose bushes, stone fountains, and delicate little flowers in a riot of colors.
They sat on a bench beneath a trellis covered in flowering vines. The moonlight bathed everything with a silvery glow that made the garden look enchanted, as though a tiny troupe of elves might dance by at any moment.
Ryan was holding her hand again, and she felt the delicious tension hovering between them like the memory of joy, like a miracle.
When he kissed her, she melted, and everything inside of her dissolved into him with the sweetness of warm honey.
They parted, and she sighed his name. His earthy, manly smell mixed with the scent of flowers and lush greenery. He tasted like comfort—like the sanctuary of home.
She slowly opened her eyes. “I haven’t kissed anybody in a long time,” she said.
“Why not?”
She shook her head and didn’t answer.
“You should kiss people. You should always kiss people.” He put a hand on her face and slowly ran a thumb over her cheek.
If he’d taken her home, she would have asked him in. She wouldn’t have been able to stop herself. But they’d met at the restaurant, so he walked her to where her car was parked at the curb in front of Neptune.
“Ryan …” She started to say something, but then she didn’t know what to say. There was so much going on inside her head. She wanted to kiss him again. She wanted to tell him not to toy with her if the one he really wanted was Lacy. Most of all, she wanted to tell him not to hurt her, to be careful with her heart. She didn’t have the words, though, and so she just looked up at him and stayed silent so he wouldn’t hear the catch in her throat.
“Thank you for dinner,” he said. He took her hand in his and kissed her, just briefly, before opening the car door for her and seeing her safely inside.
She shut the door, rolled down the driver’s side window, and leaned out toward him. “I had a really good time,” she said.
“I did, too. Will you be coming to the ranch tomorrow?”
She gave him a wry grin. “I’ll have to. Now that Kendrick’s got his skylight, he’s damned well going to use it.”
He nodded and smiled, and gave the hood of her car a friendly tap before walking down Main Street toward his truck.
Chapter Fifteen
“So, you and Gen Porter, huh?” Jackson was throwing darts over at Ted’s, and he’d hit two out of three bull’s eyes, making Ryan glad they weren’t playing for money.
“We had a date,” Ryan said. He wasn’t sure he wanted to admit to anything further, at least not yet.
“That’s what I heard. Lindsey at Neptune said you two came in, had dinner. She was the bacon-wrapped fillet, you were the wild mushroom gnocchi.” His turn over, he stepped aside and handed the darts to Ryan.
“It’s so interesting being identified as a menu item,” Ryan said. He stood at the line taped on the bar’s matted-down carpeting, lined up his shot, and threw. He missed the center circle by a mile.
“So? What’s going on with you two?” Jackson prompted him. “I figure I have a right to know. She’s practically my sister-in-law.”
Ryan wanted to protest the point, but found he couldn’t. Gen and Kate were sisters in spirit, if not by birth, as he himself had pointed out to Gen during dinner. And Kate and Jackson, if not married, were certainly headed in that direction. So, yeah, he guessed Gen was practically Jackson’s sister-in-law.
He aimed and took another shot, this one two inches closer to the bull’s eye than the last one had been. Progress.
“I don’t really know what’s going on yet,” Ryan said after thinking about it a little. “We had a date. It was a really good date.” His third shot went high and to the left for five points. “Shit.”
“You going to ask her out again?” Jackson said.
“I didn’t ask her out the first time. She asked me.”
Jackson glared at him. “You’re avoiding the question.”
“You noticed.”
With the dart game over, they got two fresh mugs of beer from the bar, made their way to a small, round table in the center of the room, and sat down. It was past midnight—Jackson got off work at the restaurant late on Friday nights. After Ryan had taken Gen back to her car, he’d called Jackson and asked if he wanted to meet up. Ryan had felt restless—at loose ends—and he wasn't ready to go home.
The bar was busy, with a clientele of mostly locals drinking, playing pool, and listening to the loud music being pumped through the speaker system. The crowd at Ted’s was generally loud, generally obnoxious, but also generally harmless. The place smelled like beer and sweat, and Jackson had to raise his voice to be heard over the commotion.
“So, back to the question,” he said.
Ryan didn’t want to answer it, but he didn’t know why. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the answer. He knew. He wanted to see Gen again, and again after that. But something about the subject made him feel raw and exposed, and he wasn’t willing to let Jackson get near it just yet. He didn’t quite know how to approach it himself.
“Is it okay if we don’t talk about this?” he asked.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not girls, that’s why not.” He was aware that the answer was stupid and childish. As though men didn’t have feelings, or weren’t in touch with those feelings. As though women were somehow silly and frivolous for knowing how they felt and being unabashed about it. It occurred to him that he was being an ass.
“Look,” Ryan tried again. “There’s something there. Between me and Gen, I mean. But I’m not … I guess I just don’t know what it is yet, so I don’t know how to talk about it.”
Jackson nodded. “Fair enough.”
A minute or two later, Lacy Jordan came into the bar with a guy—some stiff who taught English at the high school. They went to the bar and the stiff said something to the bartender. Ryan glanced at them briefly—only briefly—and then turned back to Jackson. “Gen is … I don’t know. I’m not good at talking about this stuff. But I definitely need to see her again.”
Jackson looked at Ryan with interest, then looked at Lacy and the high school teacher. Then he raised his eyebrows at Ryan and grinned.
“What?” Ryan said.
“Lacy’s here.”
“What? Oh … yeah.” Ryan shrugged.
Jackson laughed and shook his head.