Matt nodded.
She didn’t move any closer yet. They stood there, eyes locked and bodies closer than they’d been in years. Oh God, they had done this before, hadn’t they? The way they held each other in the spotlight beside the barn was exactly how they’d slow-danced at prom, and he caught himself wondering why he’d never thought to kiss her back then.
Because back then wasn’t this. Instead of disco lights, she gazed up at him in the still, pale glow from above, and instead of sappy music, the only sounds were horses sleeping and munching in the barn behind them.
Dara swallowed. Her eyes flicked toward his lips. Back up again. His heart pounded and his hands shook like they did when he was on the verge of a panic attack, but he didn’t have that out-of-control feeling. Oh, this was out of control, all right, but in the “shooting down a mountain on a snowboard” kind of way.
He reached for her face, but the warmth of her skin beneath his fingertips made him draw back. She jumped too, pulling in a sharp breath, and now they were looking at each other again, his hand hovering beside her cheek and her eyes gleaming in the white light. This wasn’t just flying down a mountain anymore—this was that split second to decide between turning down the safer trail and heading straight for the dangerous near-vertical with the sheer drop-off along the edge.
And Matt had never taken the safer trail.
He slid his hand into her hair, drew her the rest of the way in and kissed her.
Everything stopped. His heart. His breath. Even the horses and the crickets in the background seemed to have fallen silent.
Dara tilted her head, and her lips encouraged his to move, so he followed her lead. His heart was pounding now, his senses zeroing in on that soft point of contact. Arms were moving, and he didn’t bother trying to keep track of whose were going where, only that her body was closer to his now, and he liked it. A lot. His head spun, and he felt weightless, like when there was suddenly nothing but air beneath his snowboard.
Oh.
So that’s what chemistry feels like.
Dara drew back, and she gazed up at him. Her eyes were wide, and she blinked a few times as if she were as startled as he was. When she sucked her lower lip into her mouth, he couldn’t help doing the same, searching for one last taste.
“So, um…” She ran a hand through his hair, and his hat tumbled off, but neither of them made any attempt to catch it. “Does that…does that answer your question?”
“About us having chemistry?”
She nodded.
So did he.
They locked eyes but didn’t speak. Neither moved in for another kiss, and he wondered if her heart was thumping as hard as his.
After God only knew how long, she loosened her embrace and stepped back. “You okay?”
“I’m…”
She gave him a little more breathing room, though they were still nearly touching.
He shook his head, and when she stepped back, he picked up his hat off the ground but didn’t put it back on. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure about this.”
“You don’t have to be. Think about it, and if it’s a no, then it’s a no. No harm, no foul.”
He held his hat in front of him, not sure why he was so worried about her noticing his hard-on—she had to have felt it. But the hat was also an implicit barrier of sorts. Which felt weird. He didn’t want to ward her off. Quite the contrary.
But he was too overwhelmed, and he didn’t know if he really wanted to kiss her again—and more—or if he was just turned on because he hadn’t been touched in too damned long. The idea of sleeping with Dara made a lot more sense now. The idea of using her? Not so much.
“I don’t know if it’s a yes or a no.”
“It’s okay.” She smiled, though her eyes were as uncertain as he felt. “Maybe it was a bad idea to suggest—”
“No, it wasn’t. To be honest, I appreciate the gesture. I just…”
“Need to think about it?”
Matt nodded.
“Then think about it.” She shrugged. “The offer’s open if you want it, and if not, we can forget about it.”
Except he wasn’t so sure he could forget about that kiss. What few times in his life he’d been kissed, it hadn’t felt anything like that.
He cleared his throat. “Do you, um, still want me to come by tomorrow?”
“Yeah. Definitely. If you still—”
“Sure. Yeah. Um. What time?”
“Let’s make it afternoon. Mornings are, uh, not great right now.”
“Okay. Sure. I’ll see you at two?”
“Perfect.” She smiled, throwing his pulse out of whack. “I’ll see you then.”
They exchanged a long look, and he thought for a moment she might come back for another kiss, but after whispered good-byes, they got into their respective vehicles.
As Dara’s taillights faded into the night, Matt slumped back against the driver’s seat.
What the hell had just happened?
He’d never thought of Dara in a sexual way before. Sure, he’d noticed that she was gorgeous, that few girls in their high school had held a candle to her back then, but she was…Dara. His childhood partner in crime and college drinking buddy. Sex had simply never factored into the equation.
Not until tonight, anyway.
Chapter Eight
Where the hell was that silverware tray?
Dara glared at the stacks of boxes—some open, some not—in her otherwise bare kitchen. She’d found the silverware, but the tray had apparently grown legs. Had she packed it in the wrong box? Or, hell, left it in the drawer back at the house in Los Angeles?
Shit. Apparently the silverware was going to remain in a shoebox or loose in a drawer until she made yet another run to Walmart.
Cursing under her breath, she added “silverware tray” to the ever-growing list of crap she’d forgotten, lost or broken between California and Aspen Mill. Chances were, most of it would turn up after she’d bought replacements. And she’d added several things today—a whole set of Tupperware, the canisters she usually kept on the kitchen counter, her electric mixer. There was a good possibility they were all right there in front of her face, but her distracted, sleep-deprived brain wasn’t registering a damned thing.
Dara sighed and faced the boxes again. She was way too scatterbrained for this right now, but she was the princess of procrastinators, and if she didn’t get all this stuff unpacked soon, it wouldn’t get done at all. Besides, if she wasn’t unpacking, she needed to be working, and setting up her house was a lot less taxing on the brain than working. Tomorrow, she’d be back in her home office and catching up on her various clients, but today, this needed to get done, damn it.
She rubbed her tired eyes. It was her own damned fault she was like this. She couldn’t even blame staying up too late or the hormone-related fatigue, though those two things weren’t helping.
It was that damned conversation in the barn’s gravel parking lot with Matt.
Had she really offered to have sex with him? It had seemed like a good idea at the time—relieving him of that pesky virginity, helping him learn a few things—but now, she wasn’t so sure.
If that kiss was any indication, they wouldn’t be cold fish together like she and Jon had been. Hell, one kiss had made her hotter than those scorching nights with her first husband.
These hormones are fucking insane.
It had to be the hormones. There was no other explanation for her suddenly being this distracted by Matt.
Even if he could scratch that hormonal itch while she helped him figure out this whole physical intimacy thing, there was still the possibility this could complicate things. And if sex with Matt did complicate things, then she could easily find herself in the same place she would be in now if Jon hadn’t relinquished his rights—sharing custody with someone she
didn’t want to be around. That wasn’t something she wanted with her baby’s father or with the best friend she’d been missing all this time.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. On the other hand, and maybe it was the hormones talking, she was intrigued by the idea. If it did complicate things, they could talk it through this time and be adults about it, right? She wanted to believe they’d never go their separate ways again. They’d both matured in the years since that stupid argument, which had turned into a much longer silence than it should have because it had happened at the worst possible time.
On the eve of her move to Los Angeles with her first husband, Matt had let it slip that he, to put it mildly, didn’t think highly of the man she’d married. What he didn’t know at the time was that the marriage was already on the rocks. Dara wasn’t about to admit it, though. Pride and immaturity turned the conversation into one of those rare but heated arguments between her and Matt.
That was the beauty of their friendship—they could fight, yell, scream, not speak for a few days and then get together, laugh about how stupid it was, talk through whatever they’d fought about in the first place and move on like nothing had ever happened.
But this time, it hadn’t worked out that way.
The next morning, Dara and Charlie had left Aspen Mill for California. The road trip had been a clusterfuck of fights in the car and angry sex in cheap motels. Then came finding a place in LA. Finding a job. Finding the money to make ends meet while Southern California’s cost of living made mincemeat of their meager savings.
By the time the smoke had cleared and she could stop and think, six months had passed. She hadn’t called Matt. Matt hadn’t called her. They finally got back in touch in October—she’d finally broken down and called him on his birthday—and they’d promised to meet up to talk when they both came to town for Christmas.
But the first Thanksgiving away from their families turned out to be the last straw for Dara and Charlie. Suddenly she wasn’t coming home for Christmas. Her time, money and energy were suddenly funneled into finding a lawyer. Finding her own place. Finding a second and third job.
Matt e-mailed her in May for her birthday, apologizing that he hadn’t called, but work had been so busy, he hadn’t had much downtime. The e-mail had been sent at two in the morning on a weeknight, so apparently he wasn’t kidding. October rolled around again. She e-mailed him. They started sending short, tentative messages back and forth, but it didn’t last. He was busy with his company. She was barely keeping her head above water with three jobs. By Thanksgiving, the communication had fizzled to almost nothing, and by Christmas, it had stopped. Her birthday came and went. His came and went. Another holiday season. On New Year’s Eve, she’d hemmed and hawed for a long time about breaking the silence, which sparked the first fight with her new—and not terribly secure—boyfriend.
A few months later, at a swanky restaurant in Hollywood, the boyfriend asked and she said yes. While Jon was out of the room later that night, she’d grabbed her phone and caught herself just before she’d excitedly texted Matt. He wouldn’t care. He didn’t even know she was seeing anyone. For that matter, she didn’t know if he was seeing anyone, or if he was still in Chicago, or, well, anything. They’d done exactly what she’d never imagined they could—they’d drifted apart.
So she’d silently wished Matt the best, and then sadly deleted him from her contacts.
In the kitchen of her rental house in Aspen Mill, Dara sighed. She’d always regretted that night. Not because she’d accepted Jon’s proposal, but because she’d given up on her friendship with Matt. All because of a stupid argument.
Dara winced at the memory. Even today, she was ashamed of why she’d lashed out at Matt that night and the things that had not just crossed her mind but come out of her mouth. As long as she lived, she’d never forget the look on his face when she’d asked point-blank what made him think he had any say at all over who she raised her future children with.
His eyes had gotten huge, and his jaw had dropped. “What? Is that what you think this is about?”
“Tell me it isn’t.”
“Of course it’s not. You know me better than that.
Yeah, she’d known him better than that, but accusing him of trying to control who raised his biological children was easier than accepting the alternative—that he was right on the money about Charlie.
They’d found their way back to friendship after all that, and that rekindled friendship was still new and quite possibly delicate. Even if this newfound chemistry was real, something that went beyond Dara’s hormones gone wild, that didn’t mean pursuing it was a good thing. She and Matt owed each other the friendship they’d stupidly let die before, and she owed her child a father more than she herself needed a man.
Except this wasn’t about her getting a man. Quite the opposite, actually. Matt wanted some experience before he started dating, and she was more than willing to get him past his bedroom anxiety. After that, the world would be his oyster.
And for God’s sake, Matt deserved better than the women he’d apparently tried to date. If he’d made it far enough past his excruciating shyness to make it out on a date with one, and she’d turned around and laughed in his face for being a virgin, he was liable to be fifty before he worked up the courage to try it again.
And, well, a little experimentation with her was as safe as he could get. There was zero risk of some gold digger trapping him with “Don’t worry, I’m on the pill—oops!”
There were too many good women out there, and over Dara’s dead body was he getting duped by a woman who used her uterus as a bear trap for billionaires. Especially since Matt freely admitted—and had demonstrated—that his ability to tell if a woman was flirting with him wasn’t great. The thought of someone taking advantage of that and screwing him over made her fists ball at her sides. No way in hell was she leaving him to the wolves if there was something she could do. After all, they’d always protected each other when they were kids. He’d tried to protect her from her asshole ex-husband, and she’d stupidly let that end their friendship. Maybe this was her chance to do right by him. To protect him from humiliation he didn’t deserve.
And if things got complicated, she and Matt were more mature this time. They could look it in the eye, talk it through and stay friends the way they should have all those years ago.
Right?
Chapter Nine
Matt followed Dara’s directions to the house she was renting near the edge of Aspen Mill. The neighborhood was familiar, and as he turned the corner, he realized he’d been here before. A few of his friends from high school had grown up on this street. In fact, he was pretty sure Dara’s rental used to be Kelly Gray’s house, back before she’d gone off to join the army and her folks had moved away. It was from the 1960s, if he remembered correctly, and though it showed its age in a few places, it was in great shape. The crumbling front porch had been rebuilt, and the drab gray paint job from years ago had been replaced by a pale yellow with pristine white trim.
Seeing Dara’s Mercedes out front was strange in more ways than one, and with last night still buzzing in his mind, he pulled in the driveway and parked beside the white car. As he got out, the front door opened, and she came down the porch steps to meet him halfway.
“Hey.” She smiled, but he could see the uncertainty in her creased forehead.
“Hey.” He cleared his throat and gestured at the house. “Nice place.”
“Thanks.” She scanned the façade as if she’d never really taken it in before. “It’s a bit cutesy for my taste, especially inside, but it’ll tide me over until I can buy something.”
“You planning on buying in Aspen Mill?”
Dara pursed her lips, then shrugged. “Don’t know yet, to be honest. I can’t really do anything until the divorce is final, so I figure I’ll think about it then.” With a quiet laugh, she added, “At l
east by then I’ll know if this town still makes me stir-crazy.”
Matt chuckled. “I think it has that effect on everyone sooner or later.”
“Yeah. But I think I’m done with places like LA. Anyway.” She gestured at the porch. “Come on in.”
He followed her up the steps and into the house, and with one look around, he understood what she meant by the interior being a little too cutesy. There wasn’t a single wall in sight that was plain white. The kitchen was bright yellow, and what he could see of the dining room was wallpapered with some country pattern that teenage Dara would’ve been tempted to vandalize with little Sharpie demons and devils.
She started toward what appeared to be the living room—it was hard to tell with a sea of boxes around the couch and coffee table—but paused. “Do you want something to drink? I, uh, don’t have any beer or anything, but…”
“It’s okay. I don’t really drink anymore anyway. Coffee would be great, though.”
She took him into the kitchen, which was mostly moved in, aside from a couple of boxes. He didn’t miss those days—it must’ve taken him three months to get all the boxes and packing material out of his house. How he’d ever fit that much crap into his penthouse condo, he’d never know.
As she poured them each a cup of coffee, she asked, “So what made you stop drinking?”
“Side effect of working myself so far into the ground.”
“How so?”
“Because of the stress, I started getting really bad migraines, and I still get them at the drop of a hat now. Alcohol makes it worse, so, it had to go.” He scowled. “Unfortunately.”
“Oh right. You mentioned that when we had dinner with your…” She waved her hand and then handed him a cup of coffee. Black, of course, which was how she apparently took hers now too. “Anyway, I feel ya. I’m going through a dry divorce.”
“A dry divorce? Is that a thing now?”
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