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It was this tension between them, this electricity.
Which means you’d better pull back and not make quite such a dick of yourself; otherwise, yeah, someone’s going to get hurt.
Finn gritted his teeth and put a leash on his temper as well as the libido that wasn’t showing any signs of slipping back to the coma it had been in for the past five years.
Then he got into the truck, shut the door. “Now you owe me,” he said in more normal tones.
She glanced at him. “Owe you?”
“Yeah.” He started the engine, then turned his head, meeting her gaze. “You owe me a sausage roll.”
A little flake of pastry rested on her cheek, and it was all he could do to restrain himself from reaching out and brushing it away.
A crease appeared between her blond brows, and she studied him for a long moment, as if she found him puzzling. Then it disappeared.
“Okay, fair,” she said.
“But I’ll take a beer instead,” he amended, knowing this was a bad idea but saying it all the same. Because he’d been a dick and he wanted to make it up to her, and he’d promised Clint he’d handle himself. “By way of an apology.”
“Your way of apologizing is to let me buy you a beer?”
“Fine. I’ll buy the beer and we can talk about how to get Evan to give up at least one of his paintings.”
Beth’s usually radiant smile was a little uncertain at first, but it slowly crept over her face like a summer sunrise, warm and sweet and full of promise.
“Seriously? That would be wonderful. But please, you’re right, I do owe you, so I will definitely be buying the beer.”
And he had to look away. Had to almost physically force himself not to keep staring at that beautiful, beautiful smile.
Because that one wasn’t fake, and it touched him.
He hated that it touched him.
“Good,” he said with no emphasis whatsoever. “That’s settled then.”
And he didn’t say another word as he drove them both back down into town.
Chapter 3
A couple of days later, Beth stood at the big wooden counter in Brightwater Dreams with Indigo and Izzy. The gallery was a beautiful space with a high ceiling and exposed beams, a gleaming polished wooden floor, brick walls, and purpose-built wooden shelves full of stock. Light poured through the big windows that looked out toward the lake, giving the place a light, airy feel.
The three of them were exclaiming over the perfect, deep-blue sapphire that graced Izzy’s finger. Chase had given it to her the night before and asked her to marry him and of course the answer was yes.
She was incandescently happy and Beth was ecstatic for her. And it only made her more sure that coming here had been the right move. Because if Izzy could find happiness here, then surely she could too.
Izzy wasn’t from Deep River, like Beth and Indigo were. Izzy was from Texas, though Beth and Indigo had met her before, since she was Zeke Montgomery’s sister and had visited Deep River more than once. But they hadn’t expected her to join them on their New Zealand trip as a last-minute replacement for another Deep River woman who’d had to pull out for family reasons.
Izzy had been fleeing a broken engagement and a career in ruins, and so had joined their expedition as the default admin person. She wasn’t creative in the same way Beth and Indigo were, but Izzy knew business inside and out and had been a godsend when it had come to setting up the gallery and figuring out logistics.
She was also kindhearted, generous, and cool under pressure, and Beth liked her very much.
“It’s gorgeous.” Beth stared down at the glittering blue stone with a professional eye. “Beautifully made too. Chase really knocked it out of the park.”
“He so did.” Indigo, standing at the counter next to Beth, leaned in to take a closer look, her brown hair falling over one shoulder as she did so.
Indigo was another Deep River native, though she and Beth had only known each other casually. She’d been brought up in an isolated homestead by her maternal grandmother. What happened to Indigo’s parents, Beth had never asked and Indigo had never said, but her grandmother had been an agoraphobic hermit, homeschooling her and never letting her out of her sight. Indigo had never been anywhere, never done anything, and when her grandmother had died unexpectedly, she of course decided to come all the way out to New Zealand.
As a rebellion against her upbringing went, it was marked and Beth was very curious why Indigo had wanted to come out here, since Indigo seemed to find people, and indeed life in general, quite suspicious.
