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Wanting to believe him.
Wanting so badly to believe.
And determining that she’d try with all of her might.
For her baby’s sake. For Greg’s.
And for her own, too.
She was coming back to life.
Chapter Sixteen
Greg knew that the real problem preventing him and Elaina from ever having more than a friendship was the memory of Peter Alexander. Knew, too, that he’d never be able to compete with a dead man.
Didn’t even want to.
If he was going to go up against anyone for anything, he wanted all competitors present there of their own accord, and on an equal playing field.
He’d never been much of a competitor, anyway. He liked to read. To study. To figure out perplexing puzzles.
And he liked Elaina Alexander more than he’d ever liked anything or anyone in his life.
He hadn’t been sure she’d want to keep their grocery shopping plans for Friday after work, not after they’d nearly lost their minds in his room only hours before, but he was glad to see her car pull up the drive just a few minutes after he’d arrived home to change. Living with the admission that he was in love with her, he was relieved as hell, was more like it. He’d looked for her at work that day, but during the only break he’d had, she’d been with a patient.
“I wasn’t sure you’d still want to shop with me,” she said as she climbed into the front seat of his new big SUV, having changed out of her scrubs into a dark, tie-dyed tank sundress. She’d redone her ponytail, too, leaving her shoulders bare. With the humid eighty-degree temperature that day, he understood her need to be cool. Comfortable. He could have done without seeing those shoulders, though, so soon after having buried his head in them.
“We have to eat,” he told her a second later than he probably should have. She surely knew he’d been thinking of something else.
And smart as she was, or more accurately, as well as she knew him, she’d probably know what he’d been thinking about, too.
“And the way to handle what happened last night is to face it head-on,” he hastily said. “If we pretend it didn’t happen, it’s just going to lie in wait, and get us again.”
She nodded. “You must have been...uncomfortable...”
“I took care of it.” She could make of that what she liked, but he hoped she was picturing him with his hand active—and wanting it to have been hers—since he’d been picturing the hand as hers.
“For what it’s worth, I didn’t,” she replied pragmatically.
So much for her sharing his lustful solution. He needed to face it head-on, but wasn’t so fond of being hit on the head with it.
“For future reference, can we keep that kind of information to ourselves? Unless of course you want us both to share every time we have...um...difficult nights?”
She chuckled. “You’re going to hold me to the fire, aren’t you, Adams? Making sure that I don’t require anything of you that isn’t also required of me.”
“Would you have it any other way?”
“No.”
They rode in silence for a couple of minutes and, laying her head back on the seat, she sighed, looking more relaxed than he’d seen her outside of his bed immediately after sex.
“You’re certainly a different passenger than I had riding with me to Mission Viejo earlier in the week,” he said, wanting her to see that they really could get through the tough times. Less than twenty-four hours since they’d almost made a horrible mistake, and there she was, comfortable going grocery shopping with him.
“I feel safer in the bigger car,” she told him. “And safer when I’m the driver.”
And he felt like an A-class idiot.
He’d been all over what it had to have taken her to recover from paralysis. And to deal with the death of the love of her life in a vehicle.
