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Every time she thought about it, Becca’s stomach swooped and knotted.
Did she want to leave Autre? Not entirely. But she wouldn’t have to leave entirely. She could live in Autre and commute to Houma.
And now looking at Beau, she realized there was another good reason. If she left Autre the way he was expecting her to, they could date.
He was afraid that Autre wouldn’t be enough for her. That they would start something, then she would decide to leave, and not only would they break up, but she knew it would break his heart that their hometown wasn’t enough for her.
This would fix that entire situation. She could be somewhere else where she didn’t have all of this pressure and disappointment, and that other shoe he was waiting to drop would have already fallen.
But she couldn’t tell him about it yet. It was only a simple conversation she’d had with a friend. It wasn’t even a conversation with anyone who could hire her. It certainly wasn’t a job offer.
“Yeah, let’s go to the fall festival,” she decided. That would keep her from saying anything she shouldn’t about the job. Or about her feelings for him.
“Sounds good. I saw pumpkin bars and apple cider on that poster. That’s all I need to know.”
She forced a smile. “Great.”
They stopped first at the bed and breakfast to check-in.
As expected, Maggie was delighted to see them. And not at all convincing in her apology about the single room.
Because they didn’t have any luggage, they simply stopped upstairs, used the bathroom to freshen up, then stood next to one another, staring at the bed.
“We can get extra pillows and build a little wall between us,” Becca suggested.
“Yeah, pillows will totally keep me from wanting to reach across and—”
Becca turned swiftly and slapped a hand over his mouth. “No. You can’t talk like that. Not unless you plan to act on it.”
His eyes flared with heat. His hand came up to circle her wrist. She started to pull away but he pressed her palm against his lips and kissed it. Thenhepulled her hand away. “You know I want to.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Knock it off.”
“What?”
“Talking about it.”
“I just don’t want you to think I don’t want you. That’s not it.”
She blew out a breath. “Shutup, Beau.”
“I just don’t want you feeling rejected or something.”
“Argh!” she groaned. “How do you not get this? This is…” She cast about for an analogy. “It’s like you having a huge hot fudge sundae, me starving for it, and you continually waving it around in front of me, while telling me I can’t…” She regretted the analogy at that point. Because ice cream made her think of words like “lick”. Because sure, yeah, you could “take a bite” of ice cream. But did you really? Even when it was on a spoon, there was a lot of tongue and lip involved.
He cleared his throat. “Got it.”
Okay, so she maybe hadn’t needed to use the words “huge” and “starving” either.
She pulled herself together. Sort of. “So the nice thing to do would be to toss the hot fudge sundae in the garbage and stop talking about it.”
“But you have such a great sundae,” he said. “I can’t get away from you.”
She knew him. Well. He’d meant that to come off as flippant and funny.Notas hot.
But he hadn’t quite gotten his voice out of the gruff, sexy range and he definitely hadn’t gotten the heat and want out of his eyes.
She felt like he’d poured hot fudge over her—warm and very much like she’d have liked to have his mouth on her.
