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“You did great. I’m so proud of you,” Ben said.
My heart thumped hard under my rib cage. I needed separation. I needed to remove myself from Cammie and Ben’s sphere. If I didn’t, I’d be sucked into their orbit. I’d start to think that Ben was someone special. That I could overlook our past, our current situation, that something could happen between us.
He wasn’t for me. We had too much history and too much at stake. My business meant too much to me to let it go for a man who might not be who he seemed. I wasn’t ready to take that risk, no matter what Hailey thought.
I started packing up. “Come on, Hunter. We’d better grab lunch. It’s getting late.”
“Oh, man,” Hunter grumbled.
“Want to grab lunch together? There’s a sandwich shop next door.”
“That’s probably not a good idea.” My words were in line with my thoughts, but Ben had no idea what I’d been thinking.
“You’re hungry?” Ben asked.
Hunter nodded. “I’m starving.”
“Me, too,” said Cammie.
“No harm in grabbing a meal together.” Ben raised his brow in a silent challenge.
Oh, there was harm. Each interaction with Ben brought us closer when I should have been pushing him away. “Fine.”
Great. Now I sounded like my seven-year-old nephew, who said fine whenever he gave in to something he didn’t want to do.
“Perfect,” Ben said.
Didn’t he realize what we were doing was a bad idea? We should be spending less time together, not more. I resolved to part ways with Cammie and Ben after we ate.
Relaxed after deciding on a doable plan, I followed them outside, where we stowed our baseball bags in our respective cars, then headed inside a nearby sandwich shop. The kids went ahead of us, ordering what they wanted.
“You don’t want to spend time with me?” Ben stood close, his head lowered so he could talk only to me.
I chewed my lower lip. “It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?” His stance was relaxed, and his expression was genuinely curious.
I gave him a pointed look. “You know this is a bad idea.”
He tipped his head toward Cammie and Hunter. “They’re spending time together.”
Why did I get the impression he was using the kids as a buffer, a way to get close without me noticing? “Hunter’s not mine, but—”
“You’re overthinking this,” Ben said gently.
It would be so easy to relax and let myself enjoy standing close to Ben. “Our coffee shops aren’t competitors, then?”
He looked down at me, his jaw tight. “That’s business.”
“And what’s this?” I tipped my head to the side, wishing I knew what he was thinking and where he was going with it.
“You know what you want?” a teenager behind the counter asked.
Ben stepped forward, and the moment was over. Whatever he’d been getting at, it was too late to return to the conversation. Not with Cammie and Hunter talking about their hitting prowess in the batting cages. If Cammie were anything like Hunter, she’d get annoyed if we tried to talk about something else.
We sat across from each other, but the kids dominated the conversation. I counted the seconds until I could safely escape to my car. I’d let Hunter pick our afternoon movie so I could decipher everything that happened. I just needed time to analyze it, make sense of it, and put whatever was happening between us back in the box it needed to be in.
We rolled up our wrappers and threw out our trash. We walked together across the parking lot. “What are you doing for the rest of the day?” Ben asked.
