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“Come on. It’ll be really funny in a few days. That was like a classic romantic-comedy scene. We’ll tell that story over Christmas dinner for years to come.”
He shot her a glare. “Not funny.”
“Totally funny. Have you talked to her?”
“Not yet. She’s working today, and God knows she probably doesn’t want me coming into the library and starting rumors.”
Annabelle just shook her head. “You’re going to call her, right?”
Yes, he was going to call her. There was no denying the attraction between them now, and he felt stupid for having spent so long trying. Yes, Ruth had known Lauren, and worrying that there’d been a subliminal attraction before didn’t honor his wife’s memory. She would want him to be happy. In fact, she’d told him that close to the end. She’d smiled and told him to remember he had a whole life left to live.
Steve might be a stickier issue. He seemed to hold a small flame for his ex-wife, but who wouldn’t? Jake had last seen him at the city’s Fourth of July barbecue, and even so many years after the divorce, Steve had seen fit to say Lauren didn’t know what she was missing. Screw that bastard if he hadn’t been able to make it work with a woman like Lauren. Screw him for bragging about being free to date younger women.
After what Jake had felt with Lauren last night, he’d be a fool and a coward to lose her out of fear. He did have a whole life left, and Lauren made him feel damn ready to live it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LAUREN PINNED HER hair up in a knot and headed for the kitchen to pour herself another glass of wine. She’d made it through the day without dying of embarrassment, and now her only plan was to soak in a hot bath and get fantastically drunk while doing it.
The day Sawyer had left for college, she’d bought herself the silkiest little black robe she could find. She loved the feel of it against her skin. She might not be taut and twenty, but she loved being herself so much more now. She loved her own hands on her skin and the way her body worked. She needed to embrace that. Not with Jake. And maybe not with a twentysomething French guy, either. But with herself... Oh, with herself, she was getting pretty darn confident.
That was something good, and a girl had to embrace what she was good at...and then leave behind all the other crap that she couldn’t quite manage.
She’d almost talked herself into a good mood, but before she could get out of the kitchen with her wineglass—and the bottle—someone knocked on the front door.
Lauren froze, bottle and glass clutched in her hands, gaze sliding toward her front door. If she’d been more proactive, she could’ve made a break for it. She’d been meaning to frost the little window in the front door for years so that no one could see inside and she could ignore visitors at will. But she’d never gotten around to it and now the man on her front step could see straight through her tiny living room into the kitchen beyond, where she stood as though she’d turned to stone.
And because it was still light out, she could see him, too.
Jake. Of course.
He raised an eyebrow. She raised one back.
She knew he wasn’t going to go away, but she gave him a few seconds just in case. As the past twenty-four hours flashed through her mind, her heart stepped up to an anxious pace. Then it scrambled from anxiety to alarm. Shit. She really didn’t want to do this. Now or ever. But especially not now.
He cocked his head, and Lauren forced herself to walk toward the door. She set down the wineglass on the little table where she kept her keys, and then she unlocked the door.
Jake was holding yellow roses. Her heart stopped its flailing and fell into the pit of her stomach.
“Lauren,” he said simply.
She stared at the flowers for a long time before she took them.
“I hoped we could talk.”
“Sure,” she breathed. But she just stood there, flowers in one hand, bottle of wine in the other, as if they were about to begin a night of sweetly meaningful debauchery.
She shook her head, trying to force her shock away, then opened the door wider. “Come in.”
For a moment, everything inside her told her to throw the roses out the door. She didn’t know why, but she needed to get rid of them. They weren’t right. But she hadn’t had enough wine to be that irrational, so she took the wine and the flowers to the kitchen and left them both on the counter.
“I didn’t know what to say last night,” Jake started.
Lauren didn’t want the flowers, but she started fussing with them now, because that was better than facing him. “You didn’t need to say anything.”
“Everything happened so quickly.”
Yes, there was that. She’d quickly pulled him down on the couch, quickly kicked off her panties and very quickly come for him. She’d been just seconds from jumping straight into quickly getting him inside her.
