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“You know I’m right,” he said.
She laughed. “What most people mistake for love is infatuation. Infatuation fades fast once people truly learn each other. Then they each diminish in the absence of the fantasy. See that couple there?”
Rowan nodded in the direction of an elderly couple, swaying in a tight embrace. The man was as bald as an egg and stoop-shouldered with age, and the woman had a puff of white hair so thin her scalp was visible through the teased curls. They had to be in their eighties.
“I do,” he said, cautiously.
“They’re fresh out of college. Married last year,” Rowan said.
His crack of laughter drew the eyes of other dancers. Then he sobered. “My parents have been married forty years. Still in love. That’smystandard. My example.”
“That’s precarious, don’t you think? When you put a thing on a pedestal, you beg fate to tip it over.”
“Oh, Christ,” Harrison said, “now you sound like my brother Malcolm.”
“Maybe you should introduce us,” she teased.
He gave her a long look. “I don’t think so.”
She shrugged.
“So, love is your boogeyman,” he said. “You think—if you don’t believe in it, it can’t hurt you.”
“I’m a scientist, Harrison. Fundamentally, so are you. You know truth doesn’t care about what webelieve.”
“Why did you kiss me?”
Rowan was instantly unbalanced. His tone sounded mild, but it lied. The truth was in the rapid dilation of his pupils, and the stiff bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. Hard.
Earlier, she’d shivered in the cold, but now, a trickle of sweat raced between her breasts. The clasp of her bra dug into her back, and the seam of her jeans was gritty between her thighs. Her very bones wanted to leap free of her skin and dance away into the darkness.
The music and the crowd whirled around her like a carousel, but Harrison remained in sharp detail. A tiny piece of ash from the bonfire landed on his shoulder like a flake of snow. Rowan saw a tiny scar on his chin, no bigger than the edge of a fingernail. The middle button of his navy Henley was about to slip free, and the collar of the T-shirt underneath was the same tidal gray as his eyes.
Since Noah, Rowan was vigilant about maintaining the power in her relationships. No-strings sex as a matter of policy. Always andonlywith men who liked her just a bit more than she’d ever liked them. With Harrison, the power imbalance already skewed hard in his favor, and she’d only known him two months. She’d shown him her entire hand with that impulsive, half-assed kiss.
He weakened her, with his big, kind hands and solemn eyes. And his fucking ridiculous chin dimple, and those outrageous flipped-up curls at his nape, and the way he stood when she entered a room, and how he thumbed the brim of an imaginary hat every time he saw her around the vineyards, and—
Damn it.
With him, she was the one with the most to lose, and she’d never allow herself to be in that position again.
Rowan dug deep for the aloof, cerebral serenity she’d used on every other man for the past eight years. “I was excited we’d won. I’d have kissed Frankie that way too, but you were closest.”
His head listed to the side. Evaluating. “Bullshit,” he murmured.
“Kiss of gratitude. That’s all. It was a peck on the cheek, Harrison.”
“It wasn’t just my cheek. You were chewing grape gum. Itastedit.”
“I wasgoingfor your cheek,” she snapped. The couple dancing next to them turned their heads in unison. She whispered, “You pulled sideways and made it weird.”
Harrison was quiet for a while, and the band played a sweet, slow cover of “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire. Rowan stared at the half-done button on his shirt, and the throbbing pulse point in his neck. When she lifted her eyes, his face transformed. The tension in his jaw released, and he nudged his bottom lip with the tip of his tongue. His irises were bright and sharp as bottle glass, and riveted on her mouth.
“Christ. I’d been thinking it was my imagination.” The rumbly tone was back. “I’m reallynotimagining this, am I?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her heart slammed her sternum now, rattling her ribs from the inside.
“You’re as curious about this as I am. About us.”
