“Becca, you are a strange one,” he said.
“Strange?” I enquired.
He shook his head and continued to smile. “Fence jumping, bestseller writing, nesting-bird scaring, library breaking, graveyard stomping, head banging, wife acting, chaos causing, cat stealing, fake naming, cat maiming, wasabi eating—”
“Hang on, hang on!” I held my hand up and cut him off. “You can’t label me with all those. There are some serious extenuating circumstances that led me to do all of those things,” I said, in my defense.
His smile grew even more. “With-everything arguing—”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I cut him off again. “What you just said is all very grammatically incorrect, thus meaningless.”
He laughed. It sounded amazing. Like my favorite song. The soundtrack I had been waiting to hear. He leaned closer to me and his sudden closeness was so palpable, so tangible, that all the muscles in my body contracted and suddenly I felt like I was sitting more upright than I had in a while. As if every part of my body was standing to attention, like those soldiers with the fluffy hats outside Buckingham Palace. And then his smile faltered, he hung his head and shook it.
“What just happened?” I asked.
“I’ve got a real problem on my hands, here.” He kept shaking his head.
“What problem?”
He looked up, reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, like he had that night in the bar.
A long, loud breath escaped my lips.Shit, I hadn’t meant for it to be that loud. “Wh . . . what problem?” I repeated, as his hand grazed the side of cheek, slowly, deliberately.
“It seems I’m really attracted to the criminal elements.” He came closer to me, his lips almost touching mine.
“You . . . you said, if I came back to town, you would arrest me. Are you going to? Arrest me?” I asked, his lips brushing against mine.
“You’ve put me in a very tricky position, here, Becca.” He ran his thumb over my bottom lip and I felt my whole body melting into the seat. “I should arrest you, but . . .” He trailed off.
“You can’t?” I asked.
He shook his head and his eyes moved down to my lips. “What is it about you, Becca?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Ever since you came to town, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.” He placed his other hand on my cheek, cradling my face between his big hands. I closed my eyes and drifted away a little, allowing myself to indulge in the warm feeling of his hands on my skin, the coolness of his breath as it danced across my face like a soft, gentle breeze of breeziness. So airy and breezy and wispy and . . . did I saybreeziness. . . ?
