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Ethan was standing on her front porch with tousled hair and a sheepish smile. Her embarrassment from the night before and the anger she’d been carrying around since their almost-date dimmed at the sight of him, leaving her once again unsettled at how quickly her common sense vanished when he looked at her.
“Hey,” he said quickly, hands up like he thought she might close the door in his face. “I know you’re probably pissed at me about what happened the other day but …” He trailed off, his eyes widening as he stared over her right shoulder into the house behind her.
She already knew what she’d see if she turned to look, and she gave him an exaggerated, long-suffering sigh. “They’re behind me, aren’t they?”
“All three of them,” he confirmed, shooting a charming grin in the direction of her living room. “I thought you weren’t alone in the window last night and I’m glad it was a sleepover with the girls and not a date.”
His gaze was suddenly warm, possessive, and it was enough to remind her why she had been irritated with him in the first place. She leaned on the door frame, arms crossed over her chest and determined to ignore that he was seeing her in her pajamas again. “How do you know it wasn’t a date?”
“Oh,” he said, looking from her to the living room and back. “You and … all of them, huh? Well, aren’t you just full of surprises?” He let the words linger in a deliberately speculative drawl that did nothing to conceal the humor in his tone.
She knew he didn’t believe her—she was clearly too tightly wound to regularly participate in orgies—and shook her head, an unwilling smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “What do you want, Ethan?”
“To apologize for how I handled things with Dylan,” he said. “And then maybe I could give you that dinner I owe you? I’ll take you out this time, so you don’t have to cook for me. Just as friends,” he added quickly, holding up his hands to stop her from voicing the rejection already forming on her tongue.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. Chloe’s idea was still tempting—even more so now that he was standing on her doorstep with that charming grin and she hadn’t melted onto the floor in a puddle of shame—but everything about her life had been exactly the way she liked it before he’d showed up.
Clean.
Orderly.
Predictable.
His presence had upset her balance and it frightened her. What would she do, if instead of getting the itch out of her system, spending time with him somehow made it worse?
“We can go anywhere you want,” he said, taking a step closer until he was crowding her space and she could feel the heat of his chest, “even if it’s just out for coffee and then afterward you could come over and visit Winston.”
She squinted up at him, a frown twisting her lips as he winked at her. “Tempting me with a cute dog isn’t fair,” she protested.
“You know what they say,” he mused, twisting a lock of her hair between his fingers. “All’s fair in love.”
“And war,” she retorted. “Which one is this?”
“I think that depends on which one of us you ask,” he said. “Maybe a bit of both?”
She huffed at him and gently swatted at his hand until it fell away from her hair. There was absolutely no chance that she was not going to regret what she was about to say, but the will to resist him melted away every time she looked into those blue eyes of his.
She hesitated, standing in the doorway of her tidy little house as Ethan waited for an answer. It seemed to her that she was standing at the edge of some intangible precipice, poised breathlessly to fall or fly if she were foolish enough to jump.
“We can go to dinner but that’s it. And,” she rushed to add, “just as friends.”
“Just friends,” he agreed. His face was stoic but the look in eyes was unsettlingly triumphant.
“Oh, and I want an explanation for whatever that was that happened with Dylan. I admit I jumped to the worst possible conclusion, because that’s what I do, but I still think I deserve to know what is actually going on.”
He winced but nodded reluctantly. “I was hoping you’d forgotten about that but, yeah, sure. We can talk about it at dinner, okay?”
“Okay.” He perked up again at that, the glint back in his eye, and she sighed. “I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”
His dimples flashed and he chuckled, low and satisfied in a way that made her stomach flip. “Not if I can help it, sweetheart.”
Seven
She’d agreed to go to dinner with him.
Just as friends.
She’d meant that, she really had, but the idea of going to dinner with him still tied her stomach up in knots and she wasn’t sure if it was mostly him that she didn’t trust to stick to that rule or herself.
