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“Perfect.” Kiki dropped her shoulder and sent Andie a smoldering look with one arched brow. “How’s my smoker’s rasp?” she asked in her best Lauren Bacall imitation.
“Flawless.” They shared a laugh then Andie felt her stomach plummet to the soles of her feet when she heard the knock on her door.
* * *
Luke tuckedthe chair in behind Andie at the town’s only decent restaurant as she sat and reached for her napkin. He never understood exactly how to help a woman into her chair. It was always an awkward moment of shuffling while the grating of the chair legs on the floor echoed in the room like a shot. More times than not, the woman he was “helping” ended up pulling herself in to the table after he took his seat anyway. But his father had done this for his mother his entire life. His father had also taken him aside when he was fifteen and about to go on his first official date.
“Son,” he started, with one big, weathered hand clamped on his shoulder like a meaty club. “You want to stand apart from the crowd. Be a man. The man you were raised to be. Treat every girl like she’s worth a damn instead of acting like the ninety-nine morons out of a hundred males cropping up these days. Just trust me on this.”
Luke smiled as he remembered the rest of the lecture that went into detail about sex and safety. He’d taken the first part of that talk to heart and lived by those rules to this day. For the first three or so years he was raising a baby all on his own, he had a couple moments where he wished he listened to the second part of his father’s advice better, but even then, he never regretted Logan. Just Logan’s mother.
“It’s all bar food here,” Luke said as he took his seat across from her, “but for bar food, it’s pretty good. They have a great Caesar salad if you want something semi-healthy, but that’s about the extent of their vegetable choices.”
She smiled at him.Impishly, he thought, and though he’d never ascribed that attribute to anyone before, it fit her perfectly in that moment. “What makes you think I need a vegetable selection? I can down shots and scarf grease with the best of them. Don’t let the skirt fool you.”
“Oh yeah?” Charmed. That’s what she did; she just charmed him with every word she spoke.
“Oh. Yeah.” Andie nodded decisively as he took his seat and drank from one of the water glasses their waitress brought to the table. “I draw the line at beer though. Ugh. Kiki drinks it, but I never could understand the appeal of drinking something that looks, smells, and I’m sure tastes like carbonated urine. Not my thing.”
The spray from his sit-com perfect spit-take spewed across the table and—thankfully—just missed her. He choked and laughed while he simultaneously tried to mop up the mess he just made.
“Sorry.” The smirk on her face made the word a lie as she reached across the small table and tried to help by pounding on his back.
“Carbonated urine?” he croaked out when the worst had passed. “God, woman. You damn near killed me with that one.”
“Yeah, well,” she said with a pink tint to her cheeks, “for about the next eight months or so, it’s a moot point anyway.” Then she flashed him a grimace. “Dammit.”
“Tell you what,” Luke said. “I’ll be sober with you. We can both go without booze. I think it will probably take me that long to face a beer again anyway, thanks to your analogy.”
“Really?” Her whole face lit up when she was pleased. It was like there was a light that clicked on under her skin and she glowed at him like a damn angel. “You’d do that for me?” Just then, to keep her looking at him all lit up like that, he couldn’t think of a thing he wouldn’t do for her. All he said was “Sure.” No need to let her know how wrapped around her finger he was this early in the game.
“That’s really great of you. Thank you. I don’t drink a lot, but it isnotgoing to be fun being the only sober one. Now, thanks to you, my misery will have company.”
“You guys ready to order?” Jessica asked then looked up from her pad. “Oh! Hey, what’s up, guys?”
“Hi, Jess,” Andie said with a big smile for her new friend and part-time chef. “What do you recommend? It’s my first time here, and I was gonna ask the big guy here to make a suggestion until I found out he likes beer. Now, I’m doubting his taste buds.”
“I hear you on that.” Jessica laughed and gave a mock shudder. “Gross.”
“You know I’m the one who will be deciding your tip, right?” Luke said with a brow arched at her.
“I meant… Beer. Yum.” She made them all laugh.
Over dinnerand well into the night, Luke fell harder and harder for the beautiful woman carrying his child. She was clever and funny and down to earth in a way that he found utterly surprising. In his experience, people who lived in big cities and worked in that mysterious white-collar world were as foreign to him and his way of life as a fish was to a bird. Not Andie though. She just seemed to have shaken off the fancy trappings from her fast-lane life and was as relatable and approachable as the girl next door.
On the dusty, worn dance floor of the bar, he swayed to the music with her soft body pressed close to his. The effort to keep his touch gentle was just as hard as he remembered from the first time they danced. Every brush of her hair on his cheek, the glide of her cool fingers up his arm to his shoulder, or the all too brief press of her breasts or thighs against him stoked the fire burning in his blood. For her. Only her.
He was thinking to bring an end to their night and take her home, when the music changed to something low and sultry with a sexy, throbbing beat. “One more and then we’ll head out,” he whispered with his lips against her ear. Not that it was the type of place with blaring music or that he thought she wouldn’t be able to hear him otherwise. No, it was so he could bury his nose in the hair behind her ear and drink in the delectable scent that lingered there. It offered the added bonus of surrounding his face in silken warmth, and Luke decided he’d happily spend eternity exactly where he was.
With one arm, he pulled her hips flush to his and with his other tucked her forearm up to his chest with their clasped hands and held her as the music throbbed out a rhythm that pulsed in the air. She made him feel drunk with desire.
“Luke,” he felt Andie say, her lips damp as they brushed his neck.
“Hmm?” he murmured when she didn’t say anything else.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just needed to say your name.” Then she pulled herself in even tighter, and as far as Luke was concerned, all was right with the world.
The drive back to her place was a quiet one, both of them still throbbing internally from the evening. Good food in the company of a person who hit all the right notes has a way of rendering speech and a soundtrack unnecessary after a certain point. They had reached that point. Luke tried to keep his focus on the dark deserted road before him rather than on the incredibly turned on woman sitting mere inches away.
