Where Their Hearts Collide: Wardham Book #2 (21 page)

“Oh honey, of course. Laney’s in town for a couple more days, could we invite her, too?” Carrie waved her hands in the air. “Never mind, I’m sure
Evie won’t mind keeping it small.”

“No, it’s okay. Actually, since I missed their engagement party, it would be good to catch up. And I have some questions for her about Chase’s recovery.” Karen
picked up her coffee and pushed away from the counter. “Mmmm. And you know, maybe we should invite Mari. She’s always good for a chat, and might make Laney feel a little less like a fourth wheel.”

“If Mari comes, she’ll probably want to invite Stella. The poor girl never gets away from the farm.”

A big, joyous estrogen fest sounded like just the ticket. “The more the merrier.”

As she headed home, she noticed a missed text message from Paul, inviting her over for dinner,
then a second message rolled in, identifying the texter as Megan using her dad’s phone. When the phone rang a minute later, she answered with a laugh. “She stole your technology, eh?”

“Yep.”
Desire and confusion warred inside her at the sound of his voice, rich and calm. Could it really be this simple? Surely not. And her fleeting thought about the future, and what may or may not be, would that snowball into a problem before they ever got off the ground as a couple? And yet his voice… “So, we’ve invited you over for dinner. Do you like chicken?”

“I like everything.
Except capers.”

“Don’t
worry, we’re a caper-free house.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Six?”

“Can it be a bit later? I’ve got books to deliver to people.”

“Seven.”

“Meg won’t mind?” She was almost home. It was silly, having this conversation on the phone, really.

“Not a bit.”

He waved through his front window as she hung up, but her potential tenants were waiting on her porch, so she just nodded and turned her attention to Mitchell’s older brother Gavin and his girlfriend Stacey, who were pleased as punch at her asking price for rent, but had some trouble with moving at the start of September. Stacey was currently in a studio apartment, with furniture, and needed to be out by the end of July, just three weeks away. They could stay with Gavin’s parents for a bit, but…

“Say no more, I get it. At the very least, you can put your furniture in my garage, or the spare room. That’s what I was going to do, to make room for your stuff. We’ll sort it out.”

“Thank you, Karen.” The look shared between the young, eager lovers at the prospect of being mere weeks away from living together sent a pang of longing through her gut. At the bare minimum, if everything went well, she was a year away from being free and clear to hope for the same thing.

Baby steps. First, dinner with his daughter, who saw them kissing last night, and still wanted to spend them with her. Panic about a potential future could wait until some point after that.

After Gavin and Stacey took off, probably to go screw like bunnies from the way they were groping each other on the way out, Karen turned her attention to the bags of large print and audio books, as well as regular paperbacks, that she’d take around to the two retirement homes and a
number of Wardham residents who still lived on their own but had trouble getting to the library on a regular basis.

For a wh
ile, she and Mildred had tried using the library resources for this project, but the logistics got a bit difficult as the list of readers grew. Waiving late fees, keeping track of library cards…a few sheets of paperwork turned into a heavy binder, and that wasn’t in the spirit of fun reading. Karen called it a bookmobile, but it was really just a few bags of books in her trunk. A lean, mean, lending machine. And after word got out that she was looking for books to share with community members with accessibility issues, donations piled in, and continued to show up on her doorstep from time to time. Most of the time, she didn’t even bother signing books out for people, just left something they might like and took back what she recognized as having been borrowed before. Each one had a large sticker on the back with her address and phone number, and every few months she added another tote bag to her collection, so from an inventory management perspective, she was quite content with the laissez-faire approach.

So why could
n’t she let go and just let whatever would be with Paul…just be? See what would happen over time, organically? Something was happening, that was for sure. Something that would have to end, or be put on hold, by the end of the summer. And the queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach told her it might not be exactly what she wanted.

Too bad she couldn’t change that without sacrificing her second chance at her dream career.

Dinner had been nice. Really nice, but it would have been better if Karen hadn’t headed to bed—at her house, alone—at the same time Megan did.

Paul didn’t know what to make of that. He’d been so worried about sending mixed messages himself that he was just catching on to the fact that Karen might not be on totally sure footing with regard to their relationship, either. The night before, they’d been a few seconds away from ripping each other’s clothes off. That passion, even if tempered by real life, meant something. The lift in her voice when he called her. That meant something, too. Throughout dinner, he’d look up and catch her watching him, her gaze hot and full of feeling.

Yeah, there were an abundance of feelings between them. But they weren’t talking about them.

They still hadn’t been on a formal date. He needed to get on that. He did his best thinking while pounding out a few miles on a run. He didn’t have a treadmill, and didn’t want to leave Megan alone in the house, so a hard workout would have to be an acceptable substitute.

He tossed his portable pull-up bar into the doorway between the living room and the hallway, and stripped off his shirt.

One. Two. Three.

With each
lift, he considered and rejected date options. This wasn’t about determining compatibility. There was no measure of their chemistry required. This was a date they’d tell their grandchildren about. It needed to be special.

Four.
Five. Six.

Not dinner, or a movie.
Maybe a baseball game? Close, but something was missing. He could picture them at a game, pressing their heads together, making silly faces for a double self-portrait. One arm wrapped around Karen, pulling her in tight to his side, the other outstretched, holding the camera at an angle to secretly make sure to include her cleavage in the shot.

He laughed to himself and lost count, which seemed like a good point to switch to crunches. He dropped to the floor and started in on his abdominal muscles. Crunches first, then oblique side lifts. He grabbed a dumbbell from under the couch to ramp up the intensity, pinning it between his ankles for the second round.

Good, hard sweat started to roll down his back as he went back to the pull up bar for another set of reps, and as his muscles burned, clarity dawned. He pulled his boxing bag from the hall closet and took down the pull up bar, hanging the bag from the eye-hook in the middle of the doorway. It wasn’t pretty, but it kept him in shape, and from time to time, got him very much on the right track with a hard-to-fix problem.

Not that Karen was a problem. Jab. Jab.
Punch.

Except for the part where she didn’t want to hang around after Megan went to bed. That was—

“Do you always workout half-naked?”

He spun around, fists at his side.
He’d been so inside his head he hadn’t heard the back door open. “You came back.”

She moved closer, pausing to pick up his water bottle. She passed it over, and he took a big sip. “I did. I thought I was tired, but I couldn’t settle.”

She’d changed into cotton shorts and a structured tank top, and it dawned on him that she might just be naked underneath both.

“Give me a second to have a shower,
then we could watch a movie or something.”

“Megan’s asleep upstairs?”

“Yeah. The
or something
would have to be under a blanket and really quiet.” He winced. “Was that really sleazy? I’m a bit desperate to get you naked again, the line of propriety is blurry for me right now.”

She sucked in a breath and held it for a second before letting the dam burst.
“You, too? Oh, good. I thought I was a bit pathetic for coming over here for what amounts to a booty call while your daughter sleeps upstairs. Because really, that’s a terrible idea, right?”

“It’s not a terrible idea for me to fool around on the couch with my girlfriend. First base has already been
okayed by Megan.” And as he said
that
, his hard-on disappeared and he grimaced. Great. Cock blocking himself again.

She reached out and entwined their fingers together, ignoring his repeated comment about needing a shower. “I like your sweat, remember? You are so unbelievably hot right now, it makes me—” She cut herself off. “Sorry, I won’t go down that road if you’re not comfortable with us doing anything down here while she’s upstairs.”

At some point, he wanted Karen in his bed every night. If he was totally honest, that point was right now. A tremor wracked through his body.

Fuck it. Fear could
taking a flying leap. He had a claim to stake. “She knows I love you. This isn’t a booty call, and we don’t have anything to be ashamed of.” He moved to pull her hard against his body, but her hands came up between them and pressed a warning into his chest.

He’d
missed something. Her face had blanched, her eyes were wide, and it took him a moment. He re-wound his words as he took a deep breath, and heard himself tell Karen that he loved her in the most off-hand way just as she pushed herself away from him. His hands, slick with sweat, grasped at her waist, but she had moved too quickly.

She paced a few steps away,
then turned around, still speechless. Her thoughts were spinning a mile a minute, though, and he watched her face and body language as she processed. His first instinct was to spit out a bunch of other stuff, provide some context for the words that he’d felt long enough to get sloppy and share at the wrong moment. But there, it was out in the open.

And she didn’t hate it, which was good. But she was torn, that much was obvious
. Why?

“I’m leaving at the end of the summer.” Her lips barely moved, and the words slipped out. He wasn’t the only one who’d been wrapped up in fear, apparently. Damn.

“Baby. That’s okay.” He crossed the room in two long steps and wrapped her in a tight hug. “I haven’t forgotten about school. That’s going to be hard as hell, but we’ll figure something out.”

“Just like that?”
She shook her head. “I can’t disrupt your life like that. Or Megan’s.”

He hadn’t thought this through.
He’d do a much better job convincing her upstairs. In his bed. “Come on.”

She protested as he tugged her into the hall. “No! Paul…”

“Shhh. I’m sneaking you into my room.”

Megan’s room was at the front of the house, and his was at the back. Between them was a small room he’d filled with all the boxes Karen had made him move out of his garage, but that was originally going to be an office, and beside that was the bathroom. He pointed Karen to his bed, and pantomimed that she should take off her clothes. She rolled her eyes and stayed dressed as he crept down the hall to make sure Megan was asleep. He switched on the fan on her dresser, grateful for the white noise, and clicked her door closed.

Back in his room, he did the same thing, and rolled up a towel to cover the gap between his door and the floor.

“Why do I think this isn’t the first time you’ve snuck a girl into your room?” Karen hissed
gently, her eyes narrowed. Her lips betrayed her interest, though, and she lifted her arms agreeably when he gripped the bottom of her tank top and lifted.

“Not in twenty years.”

“Really? I thought…” Karen licked her lips. “Never mind, don’t want to know right now.”

He stilled for a moment, quickly rifling through the
options. Shit. “You thought my reluctance to date again was because Megan had been exposed to my dating in the past.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Not exactly. Not like this.” So not what he wanted to be talking about right now.

“Okay.”

“Karen.” He tipped her chin up until her gaze met his. “I love you.”

She shivered, and he
lifted her hand, laying a row of small kisses across her knuckles. “I’ve only said that to one other woman. Plus my mother. And Meg. And I’ve never felt it quite like this before, so you gotta know, all joking aside, I’m not sneaking you into my room. You belong here.”

A lone tear rolled down her cheek, and he moved his lips to capture it.

“Don’t cry, baby.”

“I don’t know—”

“You don’t need to know. I do. I promise.”

“There’s so much to talk about.” She ran her hands over his chest. “And that’s hard to do when you say beautiful things and
look…beautiful in front of me.”