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“I’m lying. Sometimes I lie just to be colorful. May claims it’s a bad habit, but I’m not convinced. I mostly just wanted to see what blood pudding was like.” She cut off a bite and tried it. “Not bad. I might not choose it over a McDonald’s sausage-egg-and-cheese biscuit, but it’s edible.”
“High praise for the kitchen.”
Allie grinned and forked herself another bite.
“Did I mention you look lovely today?”
She glanced down at her sailor suit, then back at his face. What she found there made her go warm all over—a sudden rush of embarrassed pleasure that hardened her nipples. “You mean it.”
“Of course.”
“You mean I look lovely, and not that I’d look more lovely if I was wearing something normal, or that I look lovely but I’m kind of making you uncomfortable, or that I look stupid and you’re teasing me.”
“Why would I mean any of those things?”
She shrugged. “That’s what people mostly mean when they talk about what I wear. What men mean. Almost always.”
As a kid, Allie hadn’t truly understood the things people felt free to tell her about her clothing choices, or that they were telling her because they were trying to “help her make better choices.” Then she’d understood but defiantly decided not to care.
But with Matt, and ever since, she’d been forced to accept that she did care. That every time she went out in public in clothes that made her happy, she was also inviting the possibility of being hurt—sometimes by someone she loved, or liked, and usually when she least expected it.
Toward the end of her relationship with Matt, she’d just given up. There was only so much hurt she could bear.
Winston shook his head. “The way you dress is interesting, and I like it, but that’s beside the point. It’s not for me. If I tell you that you’re beautiful, it’s because you are, with no illusion that you ought to be beautiful for me, or that you are beautiful for me, and certainly not with the idea I ought to have a say in it.”
Allie rose and leaned across the table to plant a kiss on his cheek. “I really like you, Winston Chamberlain.”
Winston caught the back of her neck and held her still to kiss her. “I really like you, too, Allie Fredericks. You know…” He paused a beat too long.
“What?”
“I was just thinking of what a very beautiful spy once told me. That you never know when someone you meet at a bar might turn out to be the most interesting thing to happen to you in all your life.”
Poised over the table with his hand at her nape, her butt in the air, Allie felt her heart skip a beat.
Because it was perfect—the perfect line, delivered at the perfect moment, by a man who was just so…
He scared the ever-loving crap out of her.
“Dang.” The word came out breathless and hoarse. “You have all the right moves, mailman.”
Winston did the eyebrow thing, but it twanged something horrible in her chest and she couldn’t figure out what to say or do to keep from ruining the moment, so she drank all of the rest of her wine and ate a piece of cheese without looking at him.
He picked up his knife and touched it to the china plate with a plink. Then set it down again.
“It’s frightening,” he said. “I find. It’s frightening to realize I care for you, when—”
“Maybe we shouldn’t do this.”
“What is it that we shouldn’t do?”
She gestured back and forth between them. “This, this thing, with us, we’re just going to hurt each other unless we keep it…I don’t know.”
“Light?”
She nodded, which made the heart-twanging thing much worse.
“Allie, if we’d wanted to keep it light, we missed our chance our first evening together.”
