Page 61 of The Difference Between

His brows pinch. “The tattoo?”

“The hedge trimmers you use with your hands?”

He examines the tattoo on his own forearm. At this proximity, it looks less like hedge trimmers and more like tongs used to cook a steak. He doesn’t correct me, so I must be right. But also . . . why does he look like he wants to laugh?

“Sure,” he says. “That’s why I have the hedge trimmers.”

My gaze goes to his hands. Unlike the men I’ve been with in the city with smooth skin and clean nails, true to his words, Gavin’s hands have done work. Marred with scars, they’ve lived a whole life and touched a whole world—tools, trees, and women. Fine lines of white and thick circles of red dot his knuckles, wrists, and forearms. I was right about a lot of him—Gavin is a man who works with his body, the evidence branded into his flesh—but there are blanks I can’t fill. Marks I don’t know.

Did he need stitches?

Did he go to a hospital?

Did he laugh and call the assaulting branch or blade a damn sonofabitch?

A table nearby shouts at something happening on the TV but my eyes find Gavin’s.

Surrounded by people blowing off steam, clanking glasses, and a bartender scooping ice just feet away, a shift happens. An intensity that creeps into his gaze that I feel myself matching.

Stop it, Reese! my brain screams at me. You knew him when he believed in Santa!

That brain scream doesn’t change the version of the man sitting in front of me or the space he takes up or the way he’s looking at me now. Nor does it change the way I’m looking right back or the things I’m thinking.

In a single deft movement, he swivels our stools to face one another, the wide spread of his legs becoming two firm walls around mine.

He leans in; I lean in.

His lips part; my lips part.

He lifts a hand; I go still.

He brushes my hair from my face, and for one, split, second, I close my eyes and breathe him in.

His next words are scraped and low. “And what are you reading about me now, Miss Reese?”

A familiar heat floods me. It starts low in my belly then smolders its way out to nerve endings and vein lines. It’s the one I have every time I sit on a barstool next to a man who I’m two drinks away from getting naked with then fucked by.

Only this time, it’s not a stranger in a sea of many who I’ll never see again, it’s Gavin. The man whose family I’m now connected with by a business, who lives as far from the city I’m trying to get back to as it gets, and who is a ten-years-too-young distraction that I in no way need.

And yet I don’t back away from him. If anything, his overt desire for me pulls at me like a thread. Maybe it’s a kink, but I like him wanting me. Like him stoking those first embers of a fire that might consume me as much as I like the conflict between anticipating what comes next and knowing it should never, ever happen.

My tone stays uninterested. “I’m thinking it makes sense you haven’t found a girl to settle down with since I set the bar so high for you right out of the gate.”

Gavin chuckles softly. His breath smells like trail mix and canned beer and does anything but repulse me.

“Would you believe me if I told you that you pointed me toward my future all those years ago?”

“No,” I say, smiling at his bullshit line and our ridiculous closeness. “But it’s cute you think I would.”

“Ahh.” Dimples carve through his awful beard. “So I’m cute and attractive.”

We’re dancing a line here—at least I am. I could sling a leg over his lap and press my mouth to his and he’d do nothing but grip his big, talented hands into my hips and let me lead. Just knowing that—feeling the way he’d give in to me and let me tell him what to do—sends a thrill down my spine. Makes me think he’d be a distraction worth exploring.

I lift my chin and my nose brushes his. A move that asks how far are we going to push this? “Young and dumb, actually.”

He doesn’t budge. “Not that dumb. I’m reading a book about anti-gravity—” He wets his lips. “It’s impossible to put down.”

I bite back my smile. “Bad.”