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“Fish and chips?” When Trish nodded, Cameron looked at the bartender. “Fish and chips for both of us.”
“All right, then.” He snatched up the menus and walked off as quickly as he’d approached.
Trish cleared her throat. “So, this is getting super awkward super fast and I don’t know how to deal with it, and I don’t know how I want to deal with it, so I’m just going to ignore it for the time being.”
Her penchant for talking in run-on sentences when she was nervous shouldn’t be endearing, but Cameron had given up trying to reason away his attraction to the woman. Even when she was driving him up the wall, he still found himself drawn to her.
But he could give her a reprieve for the time being. She obviously wasn’t ready to make a decision about staying or going—both on a plane and in his bed—so Cameron scooted his chair back the slightest bit to give her space. “How do you feel about ghosts?”
Trish blinked. “Ghosts?”
“Yeah, you know...ghosts. Whether you believe they’re energy or memories or literal souls doesn’t matter.”
Another slow blink. “I think I’m hallucinating because nothing coming out of your mouth makes a lick of sense.”
“We’re in London. There’s half a dozen haunted tours within easy walking distance. There’s one starting in an hour or so. It’s entertaining, to say the least.”
“But...ghosts. That doesn’t seem like something you’d be into.”
It wasn’t, but she’d confessed her love of scary movies, so he’d looked it up this morning while she was in the shower. Logic said that sort of thing would go hand in hand, and as much as Cameron wanted to toss her over his shoulder and haul her back to bed until they were required somewhere, Trish had never been to London before. It was entirely possible she’d like to explore a bit.
He shifted, not sure how to deal with how closely she watched him. “I thought you might be interested in it.”
Trish must have hit her head. It was the only explanation that made sense. She studied her water, trying to reconcile the man sitting across from her, shifting like a schoolboy who’d done something wrong and didn’t want to admit it, with the confident boss she’d come to expect. “You want to go on a haunted tour,” she said again, as if repeating it enough times would transfer the meaning of the words.
“We don’t have to.” There it was again—Cameron’s almost-guilt.
Because he doesn’t care about ghost tours. He looked up the schedule because you do.
She took a hasty sip of her water and set the glass back on the table. “I would love to do a haunted tour.” She noted the almost imperceptible relaxing of his shoulders. It wasn’t guilt she read from Cameron—it was nerves.
The realization almost made her laugh. She’d spent so much time tripping over her own feet in front of him, it had never occurred to her that he might be in over his head, too. The ground centered a bit below her feet, her perverse nature liking that he didn’t have a playbook he was pulling from. Not that she’d believed that, exactly. Cameron was many things, but a playboy didn’t make the list. That said, he obviously wasn’t the settling-down type or he would have done it by now.
Unless he hasn’t found the right person to settle down with...
Stop that.
You don’t even know where you’re going to land yet. You can’t make choices one way or another when it comes to being with another person. Even without all the stuff stacked against you, it would never work.
She didn’t want to think about that right now. Reality seemed very far away with them sitting in a darkened pub in the middle of freaking London. Trish cautiously reached out and touched his forearm. “Could we...” She swallowed hard, gathering her courage around her. “Could we table any conversations about the future for now? At least until we get back?”
“We’re only going to be here about a week.”
Such a short time and yet longer than she would have dared when she let herself imagine what it would be like if Cameron gave in to the pull between them. It will have to be enough. “The question stands.”
His dark eyes searched her face. “That’s what you want? Not to talk about anything too scary for the time we’re here.”
“Well, any haunted tour worth its salt is a little bit scary.” Her joke fell flat as the bartender appeared and set food on the table in front of them. Her mouth watered as she took in the crispy fish and chips. Oh yeah, I love London.
“Trish.”
She reluctantly dragged her gaze away from her food and back to his face. “Yeah?”
“You can have this week. After that, we’re having a conversation.”
A conversation destined to be the death knell of their fling. The writing couldn’t have been clearer on that particular wall. All she had to do was open her mouth and tell him she wanted to call the whole thing off—that it was wiser for her to leave things as they were and get the hell out of the UK and back to New York, where she could at least pretend she had her head on straight. They’d had sex a few times, but easy enough to chalk it up to temporary insanity and hope a week apart would be enough to cool their chemistry.
