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His eyes found hers. “It’s been more than a year, but it still pisses me off,” he said.
“I noticed.”
“I hate talking about it.”
“Okay.”
“I keep expecting you to ask me, and it’s making me tense.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you anything.”
Now it was her turn to stare at the sidewalk. There was a lump of paper by her toe, sodden and disintegrating. Ugly.
Its ugliness offended her. Infected her.
She heard the rustling impact of paper against concrete as he set down her packages. His fingers gripped her shoulder. “May?”
“What?”
“Look at me.”
She did. He’d come up close, and his voice was low when he spoke. “If you have to know, I’ll tell you. But it doesn’t—” He closed his eyes and exhaled again, softer this time. “I don’t think it matters.”
She studied his face, known and unknown. The deep V between his heavy eyebrows that never completely disappeared, even when he wasn’t scowling. His hooded eyes, open now, but so difficult to read. The downturned corners of his mouth.
Anybody could see that it mattered.
Back home, if she crossed paths on the sidewalk with a man this intense, she would avert her eyes and hold her breath until he was gone and everything was okay again.
Part of her wanted to do that.
Most of her wanted to do that. Her stomach hurt, her hands were shaking, and her instincts urged her to walk away fast. To get somewhere safe and familiar and stay there.
Not because she was afraid of him, but because she wasn’t, and she should be.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.
“Like what?”
He didn’t answer. Their eyes were perfectly level. Locked. She couldn’t read the mysteries of his soul in his, because they were just eyes, and she was just May. She didn’t have her sister’s ability to look at an injured animal and figure out what it needed.
Until he dipped his head and pressed his mouth to hers, she didn’t have the slightest idea that he was about to kiss her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The thing was, he couldn’t stop himself.
Her laughter had been pulling at him all afternoon, the shapes of her face—the attraction only amplified by the way her legs looked in the new jeans she’d bought and her smile in the restaurant. By the way she ate and the way she peered at him sideways, beneath lowered eyelashes. By the obvious delight she took in the diner and all the pierogis she’d packed away.
That wasn’t why he kissed her, though. It was the look in her eyes.
Even thinking about the divorce had his hackles up, made him bitter and far too sharp with her, and he hated that he’d made her wrap her arms around her waist in defense.
But even though he’d done that, her eyes didn’t reflect any of his blackest feelings back at him. She just stood there, looking. Waiting for him to figure out what came next—as if he knew. As if he were capable of pulling out of this nose dive he’d put himself in.
Reflected back at himself in her wide, brown eyes, he wanted to be good enough.
So of course he did exactly the wrong thing.
