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“Your sister must not know about her,” Rosalie said, plenty of teasing in her voice. She dared to look up at Lee, who shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Cherry doesn’t know about Diane.”
“And no one knows we’re on this date,” she said. “Besides Gretchen, who’s going to keep it a secret.” She lowered her menu and folded her arms across it.
Lee shifted on his hard chair, his eyes studying the menu items. “That’s right,” he said. “I’ll tell everyone when I’m ready.”
“Is it going to be a big deal?”
He pulled his gaze from the menu and looked at her. “Probably,” he said. “See, in the Cooper family, everything is a big deal. I may or may not have said things like I’m never dating again and the last thing I want is to ever be married again.” He returned his attention to the flimsy piece of plastic listing all of their delicious choices. “So yeah. Me showing up at the Sabbath Day dinner and announcing I went out with a woman is going to be a big deal.”
He didn’t sound happy about that, but Rosalie secretly liked it. She liked that he’d tell his family about her, and she hoped his face would flush red then as it was now. “Maybe you won’t tell them on Sunday,” she said, unrolling her silverware and laying her napkin across her lap. “Maybe it’ll just be a secret between us—and Gretchen—for a while.”
“Gretchen won’t tell,” Lee said. “She owes me for a secret I kept for her.”
Rosalie’s eyebrows went up. “Is that right? You regularly keep secrets for your brother’s fiancée?”
“It’s not like that,” Lee said, plenty of growl in his voice. He slapped his menu down on the table, some of that surliness he mentioned coming from him. Rosalie actually leaned closer to it, the danger of him exciting to her. “It’s a long story, but she basically hired us for her cream providers at the candy shop, and she asked me not to tell Will. It was a few days at most. I’m just real bad at keeping secrets.”
“Mm.” Rosalie looked up as a waiter approached. He seemed frazzled and over-busy already. They put in their drink orders, and she looked back at Lee. “Sunday is only a few days from now. Maybe her limit will be reached by then.”
Lee’s eyes widened, which only made Rosalie laugh. “Come on, cowboy,” she said, going for a term of endearment for him. He had called herbabyin the parking lot. “Let’s not worry about it tonight, okay?”
He swallowed and nodded. “All right,” he said. “Tell me about how you got into the game industry.”
He had no idea what type of Pandora’s box he’d just opened, because Rosalie could talk about board games, video games, game production, and game conceptualization for hours.Don’t do that tonight, she told herself sternly.
She did say, “I started making games for Natasha when she was little. She had a hard time learning the same things as everyone else, but she loves games. All kinds of games…”
* * *
A few hours later,Lee strolled up Rosalie’s walkway, her hand held securely in his. “If you haven’t been to a farm in a while,” he said. “I’d love to show you around mine. It’s real busy in the springtime, but we have huge apple orchards that need picking in the fall, and hayrides, and all those farm-family things. Ford loves it; I’m sure Autumn would too.” He spoke with a level of easiness that Rosalie liked. Once she’d started talking, Lee had loosened up and brought back his charm and wit and gorgeous grin.
Rosalie smiled up at the moon before remembering she had to go next door to get Autumn. She didn’t want to say good-bye to Lee at the bottom of the stairs, and she was having a hard time gearing up to let him go at all. Her own neediness surprised her, and she’d been telling herself for the past hour that she was simply lonely, and Lee had eased a lot of that.
“Thank you, Lee,” she said when her foot touched the porch. “This was a mighty fine evening.”
He chuckled and shook his head, his eyes on their still-joined hands. “That steak was mighty fine,” he said, looking up into her eyes. “You should’ve dipped it in the spicy chimichurri.”
“I liked what I tasted,” she assured him. Silence dropped between them, and Rosalie had forgotten about this awkward part of dating. Was he going to ask her out again? Should she tell him she’d love to come to his brother’s wedding with him?
Her mind blitzed around, and Lee had stepped closer and leaned down before she could make sense of it. An alarm screamed in her head that she couldn’t kiss him. This was their first date, and she couldn’t.
She sucked in a breath, and that soared through the sky, screaming the way big jets did when they flew over stadiums. Lee froze.
“Lee,” she started, but she had no idea how to finish.
“Thank you for dinner,” he said, pulling everything back in the two seconds it took him to speak those words. His hands left hers; he put a couple of feet of distance between them; he closed off all of the emotion on his face.
Without her saying anything, he turned and went down the steps, his boots making quick clickety-clicking sounds on the wood. He strode toward his truck like he couldn’t wait to get away from her, and Rosalie sighed as she watched him go.
He didn’t look back once, and she stood on her porch until the last growls of his engine disappeared from her neighborhood. Her shoulders sagged, and she ignored the loud thump from the moody rabbit on the other side of the door as she turned to follow Lee down the steps.
At the house over, only a low lamp burned in the window. Rosalie knocked quietly, and it took several long seconds before Tess opened the door. She clutched a robe across her chest, and the house was dark and silent behind her.
“Sorry,” Rosalie said in a low voice. “I’m not too late, am I?”
“It’s just after midnight,” Tess said, and Rosalie’s shock came out in a gasp.
