Chapter 9

Cassidy couldn’t drag enough air into her lungs, even once she hit the sidewalk outside Ruby’s. The heavy summer humidity didn’t help, pressing down on her with an invisible hand.

Maybe walking was the ticket. Anything other than sitting there in that diner with so much heightened awareness of Tristan that she couldn’t seem to form sentences or even coherent thoughts.

Why had she kissed him? What in the world had she been trying to prove, that her brain had truly short circuited? Because if so, she’d done a stellar job at that. As it stood, there was a distinct disconnect between what she’d instructed her brain to do—forget the kisses—and what it was actually doing, which was replaying both over and over and over again until her lips tingled and then she imagined doing it some more, which obviously Tristan would be completely on board with, but then everyone had started talking about the new doctor who was apparently cute and a doctor, which of course meant she was way smarter than Cassidy—

“Going somewhere?”

Tristan’s voice snaked through her blood and the outside temperature was no longer her only problem.

“Yeah,” she told him without turning around. “Somewhere you’re not.”

“Come on, Cass. I thought we were done with all of that nonsense.” The disapproval in his voice stopped her in her tracks.

She whirled. Mistake. Gah, he was way too close and smelled too much like heaven, exactly as he had last night and at the diner, which ultimately had driven her out of the booth because she could not stand it a moment longer. “Why are you following me?”

“Because you left,” he said simply, which made no sense at all.

“Funny, I don’t recall asking you to come with me.”

Wow, defensive much? He brought out the worst in her for some reason and yes, she’d thought they’d turned a corner last night too. Her prediction had spelled out more than just pregnancy after all. It had distinctly called out the intense bond that she’d somehow developed with him too. Intense being the operative word, and back in that shelter, she’d fully bought into what had been happening between them.

But that was before she’d been so handily reminded of her shortcomings and why having any sort of anything with Tristan was a no good, very bad idea.

“You didn’t have to ask me,” he informed her with a good layer of frost, no doubt owing to her catty tone. “I came of my own free will.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

Weary all at once, she turned and kept walking albeit much faster. She crossed the street because Ruby’s was right there with a huge plate glass window where the entire town stood plastered to the view outside, so they didn’t miss the drama playing out feet from their noses. Nice of Tristan to chase after her, like the crowd wouldn’t notice his hasty exit from the diner a second after she left.

Tristan didn’t seem to care that they were under a microscope, probably because he was used to people staring at him. He waltzed along beside her at a graceful clip thanks to his long legs and he had no trouble keeping up what she’d have called a punishing pace.

“Obviously I did have to follow you,” Tristan said. “We never finished our conversation from last night. I’m fully prepared to trail you until that happens.”

“There was something else to say?”

“You were right in the middle of admiring my shoulders when Rafferty busted us loose,” he reminded her as if she’d forgotten that they’d almost been discovered while making out.

That was at least half of what was still messing with her head. She’d gotten so wrapped up in Tristan Marchande, what with all the wonderful things he’d said to her, calling her bold and twisting around her disability so that it almost sounded like it was okay that she babbled on endlessly while she tried to sort through her thoughts, as if he cared enough to pay attention so that he could deliberately give her a break—

“Cass,” he murmured, and the low timber made her shiver, which was how she knew she was in a lot of trouble because the thermometer hovered right around ninety-eight degrees even though it was nearly eight o’clock.

“You don’t have to call me that.”

“I like it.”

She did too. Entirely too much. “I admit it, you have nice shoulders and they feel good under my fingers. But I gave you the wrong impression last night by…you know, what I did, which I shouldn’t have and I’m sorry, so let’s just move on and—”

“Stop,” he commanded, and she was so surprised, she shut her mouth in spite of a very strong desire to inform him that he didn’t get to tell her what to do. “Don’t go there. You kissed me more than once and it wasn’t an accident. Why?”

“Why, what? Why did I kiss you?” She shook her head as a million responses flooded into her beleaguered brain, none of which stuck out as particularly helpful or necessary to confess when they all started with because I’m an idiot. “I’m not having this conversation here.”

“Then where?” He crossed his arms and stared down at her, blinking his ridiculously long lashes and skewering her with those crystalline blue eyes that saw everything whether she liked it or not. “I want to hear you say you’re attracted to me and you liked kissing me. Let’s be honest with each other for once.”

Heat gathered between them as she fantasized about telling him how caught up she’d been in kissing him, how she hadn’t slept last night, not one single wink, because she’d relived the whole scene a bunch of times, only with a different ending where he declared how she’d converted him into a firm believer of all things permanent because holy cow could she envision hanging out his arms for an eternity. But she couldn’t admit that. Not to him, a man with flawlessly crafted cheekbones who deliberately set his relationships with women on fire. He’d be singing a different tune if he knew she’d been fantasizing about selling him on the merits of a slow burn that never ended.

You want to feel the security of a strong committed relationship. Yeah, that part of the prediction wasn’t in question. It was the next line that was killing her: You will have a high impact on the new man you meet.

What a joke. As if she possessed something special enough to get him to suddenly value commitment. And if by some miracle she did it, then what? She’d constantly be comparing herself to other women he’d been with and always coming up short.

Something tore open inside her and she shoved her hands down on her hips as she faced off with the angelic-faced spawn of Satan—only sharing the devil’s DNA could explain how mixed up he made her. “You want honesty? Fine. You’re the best-looking man I’ve ever seen in my life, and I was so overcome by your manly manliness that I had to have some of that. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

His expression blanked and she missed the heat that had been there a moment ago. “Not even close.”

“Too bad. That’s what you get.”

All at once, Tristan shuffled her off the street and into the empty storefront at the end of the row of buildings that included Serenity’s hotel and not much else. She let him only because it suited her to be removed as the stars of whatever show the folks at Ruby’s thought they were watching.

When Tristan shut the door behind them, it echoed through the unairconditioned space that had once been an art gallery and left in disrepair. Caleb and Havana had decreed that it should be cleaned up so it could be used as a business again, so it was in pretty good shape, albeit starkly empty.

“Why did you stuff us up in here?” she asked him crossly. “It’s almost hotter in here than it is on the—”

Tristan’s mouth cut her off midstream as he kissed her senseless. Oh, yes, there came the gush of warmed honey, pouring over her skin as it engulfed her from all sides and flowed through her pores to fill up her whole body. Then her brain completely shut down as his arms encircled her and she experienced what it was like to be held by Tristan as he pressed her close to him. In the shelter, they’d been sitting down with an ocean of couch between them. And, as she was even now discovering, there was a huge difference between kissing someone and being kissed.

She was being kissed. Wholly. Masterfully. She drowned in it and only his strong hands at her back kept her off the floor when her knees buckled.

After an eternity of being convinced her bones had dissolved, Tristan lifted his mouth and stared down into her eyes. His were filled with blue fire the same color as a welder’s torch and cut through her as easily.

“Now tell me why you kissed me,” he murmured. “And I’ll do the same, so we’ll be even.”

The warmth he’d generated a moment ago with his lips spread to her heart as she internalized that he’d not only treated her to the most amazing kiss of her life, which was saying something considering she’d have claimed that about the kisses from last night, but he’d also created this interlude as a way to help her articulate what was on her mind. It was sweet and thoughtful and unexpected, and it made her want to cry all at once.

What was she going to do with him?

“I kissed you because I wanted to,” she whispered totally against her will, but she couldn’t leave him hanging after that.

“That was my answer too. It seems as if that’s going to be my answer for a good long while.”

And then he laid his lips on hers again without any of the urgency of the first one. This kiss was more…exploratory. As if he’d found something worth taking the time to examine and she quite literally couldn’t catch her breath as she fell under the spell of his skill.

He was so tall that this kind of kissing shouldn’t work, but it did. Oh, how he made it work, threading his fingers through her hair to guide her head to the position he wanted it in, and she let him because duh. It was Tristan and he was kissing her, and she couldn’t think of anything on earth she’d rather be doing than learning what it felt like to the sole subject of a man’s attention, especially one who knew his way around a woman—

No. She couldn’t.

Her head snapped back as she abruptly ended the kiss and then she scrambled out of his arms. Instantly, he released her, just as he had last night, which said massively complimentary things about his character, none of which she wanted to think about right now when she had to stop this madness. “You can’t kiss me anymore. I can’t kiss you. This is not happening.”

The prediction had been so clear. Pregnancy was in her future and suddenly a lot closer to becoming a reality than she would have guessed. All of Serenity’s predictions came true, especially when you were trying to make them not happen.

His expression grew brittle. “Unlike last night, I’m not going anywhere until you explain why.”

“Really, Tristan? This is confusing to you?” She waved at his midsection. “You just told me last night that your relationships burn out very quickly. I don’t want to be one of your casualties and it’s not fair to try to entice me into it either.”

“How did I do that?”

“Don’t play dumb with me,” she shot back. “That’s my role. You know exactly how you do it, because you’re you with your gorgeous eyes and those shoulders that somehow feel like soft granite and don’t get me started on your—”

“Cass.” He slicked a hand across the top of his head, smoothing back invisible flyaways again. “When did it become your role to be dumb? Do I make you feel stupid?”

Caught in the trap of her own making, she stared at him, completely at a loss as to how to answer because her first instinct had been to say yes, absolutely but then in the shelter, he’d twisted that all around until he’d actually made her feel okay about how her mind didn’t always connect like it should, and in fact, he’d made her think about it a little differently so that she could compartmentalize her deficiencies into things like paperwork, articulating her thoughts, Tristan—

Oh, goodness, yes. He was her biggest deficiency because she couldn’t stop being drawn to his flame like a deranged moth. “No. Maybe you used to. But not anymore.”

She didn’t need any help feeling stupid. She got that all on her own.

“Because I said stuff in French?” He shook his head, clearly disgusted but she couldn’t be sure with who. “I’m sorry. I did stop.”

“I know. This isn’t about you.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve heard that one before.”

All at once, he scrubbed a hand over his face, and she got over herself long enough to really look at him. His expression had grown ravaged while she’d been busy bemoaning her own problems. This conversation was not all that easy for him and furthermore, she’d said something that bugged him. But what?

That’s when she remembered what he’d said yesterday about women always moving on to someone better and she got the slightest inkling that maybe it hadn’t always been by his choice. “Women give you that ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ speech a lot?”

He shrugged and glanced away but not before she saw something that looked an awful lot like vulnerability in his gaze. “I’ve heard my fair share of speeches, let’s put it that way.”

“Maybe because you inspire women to become wordy,” she muttered since she definitely fell into that category. “I know I’ve had to explain myself on multiple occasions because you don’t seem to get it when I tell you the first time.”

“Because you don’t want to be with someone who’s already told you there’s no commitment on the horizon, right?” He squeezed his eyes shut and then forced them open, blinking as if he’d just stepped out into the sunlight after being in the dark. “That’s my usual MO. And it should be here. But maybe I’m at a place where I want to try something different. What would you say to that?”

It was her turn to blink. “What are you saying? That you finally figured out you want to be the better man and you picked me to work out the kinks with?”

“No.” He scowled and then blew out a breath. “Geez. That was harsh. And maybe a good point. I didn’t really think through how that would sound out loud.”

Her heart squeezed as she internalized his misery. That she’d caused. “I’m sorry. I have a tendency to be blunt and strike first before I get clobbered. It seems to be particularly bad with you.”

The brief flash of his smile spiked through her chest, unexpected in both its appearance and its power. “Clearly I bring out the best in you.”

“Stop being charming,” she ordered without any real heat because it would be useless to be mad at him. Somewhere in the middle of last night, she’d realized his charm came naturally and it was a piece of his personality that he could no sooner extract than he could siphon the blue from the sky.

“Now why would I want to do that when I finally got you to admit that I have some charm,” he murmured and hooked a strand of her hair between two fingers, letting it slide down to the knuckle before he tucked it away behind her ear. “I like that you’re blunt with me. I always know where I stand and trust me, that’s a rare commodity, especially when it comes to women. A lot of times, they just tell me what they think I want to hear.”

Dang it. There he went again, twisting her deficiencies around his silver tongue until he made it sound almost like he admired the things about her that made it hard for her function in normal society. Normal being relative to hear him tell it. “You can count on me to never have a clue what you want to hear. I barely know how to get out what I mean to say, let alone have some special ability to read your mind at the same time.”

“Good,” he said with lift of his chin. “Keep that up. I’d much rather listen to your endless stream of consciousness than a carefully crafted response that’s got an agenda wrapped up in it. On that note, just to be sure I’ve got the right score, you’re not on board with being a guinea pig as I stumble through what it might look like to be in a relationship without immediately trying to burn it out. Right?”

Well, when he put it that way… “Absolutely not. Do you even know how to spell commitment?”

“Of course. It starts with a k.”

Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh. But it spurted out anyway through her clamped lips. “Maybe in French.”

“Cass,” he murmured. “Why not give me a chance? I was inspired by you last night. All that business about being the better man, it really spoke to me. What if we were fated to be locked in that shelter together so we could learn to appreciate each other? What if you’re the one who’s destined to break me out of my dating rut? What if—”

“What if I get pregnant?” she blurted out and the quick flash of horror in his gaze told her everything she needed to know. Serenity had given her that prediction to save Cassidy’s bacon and she would be forever grateful for the forewarning. “That’s why this is not happening. What if we got all the way to the chapel and said I do, only to end up with a positive pregnancy test a few weeks later? How would that sit with you? Because accidents happen even with good birth control, and I cannot be in relationship beta test mode, not knowing whether you’re sticking around because you’re that kind of guy who would never shirk your responsibility or if you truly figured out that what’s going on between us is real, or worse, you don’t stay, leaving me as a single mom…you didn’t interrupt me.”

“My brain is stuck,” he muttered. “It’s a huge leap from let’s see how things go to ready-made family. Also, I’ve never had any accidents so—”

“Reality is what happens when you’re planning on other stuff,” she told him with no small amount of compassion because yeah, she had just dropped that on him with no warning. “Sorry, but I have to think about these things. Nearly sixty percent of all births in the US are unplanned.”

A fact she knew well since she’d looked it up after Serenity gave her the prediction.

“That’s why you backed off. Last night,” he said with a dawning comprehension.

She nodded. “And today. Plus, you know. This is not really my real life. Gorgeous men don’t proposition me in empty storefronts on Main Street as a matter of course and I guess I just don’t really know how to handle it.”

His lips lifted in a brief smile. “I don’t generally run around propositioning women anywhere, let alone on Main Street and that’s not what I was doing, by the way. I’m trying to be sincere about what I think is happening between us and keep my sanity at the same time. It would have been nice if you’d played along.”

“Sorry.” And she meant that too. “I can’t risk it since the rest of my prediction is coming true.”

It was even now unfolding as they spoke. Unbelievably so. Who would have thought that she would influence him enough that they’d actually be having a conversation about how she’d inspired him to rethink his entire relationship philosophy?

His eyebrows shot up. “You got a prediction? From Serenity?”

Which she probably should have led with in hindsight, but he got her so mixed up.

“Yes, and before you start in on how it’s just words and all of it is hokum, I’m not a huge believer in this kind of thing either but you can’t deny there’s something a little magical about Superstition Springs that makes you start to think there’s something to the idea that some people, not everyone, but some people might have a particular sensitivity to messages from the universe—”

“She gave me one too,” he said with a short chuckle. “And I’m not about to start naysaying something I don’t know anything about other than I was actually trying to follow the prediction’s advice. Ironic that it’s what landed us here.”

“Wait. You got a prediction too? And that’s why you kissed me and followed me and what all of the talk about me being bold is about?” Her brain could not process all of the information he’d lobbed in her direction, and her vocal cords froze for once instead of blurting out all of the threads being simultaneously generated.

“I mean, yeah. To a degree.” He pressed a palm back across his temple several times as if he couldn’t quite get his thoughts in order either. “Honestly, I haven’t figured out exactly what I’m supposed to be doing and only part of it is because I’ve never been one to follow the advice of the universe, so this all new to me as well.”

“See, this is my point. If you’ve decided there’s at least a grain of truth in the subject of Serenity’s predictions, then you have to agree it’s dangerous to ignore the warning in mine. And it clearly states that pregnancy is in my immediate future.”

“Yeah, I’m working through that realization right now.” The stark expression on his face gave that a lot of credence. “Which is not in any way how I thought this conversation would go. So I’m not sure where this leaves us.”

“I’m even less sure.”

She did a little absentminded hair fiddling of her own, but it didn’t jar loose any brilliant ideas about next steps or how to navigate this somewhat bizarre yet endearing conversation. After all, he was still here, still trying to slog through whatever was going on between them instead of immediately fleeing town because some woman he’d kissed a few times started talking about handing him a screaming baby in nine months. That spoke volumes more about his character than how fast he let her go when she was ready for him to stop kissing her.

The man was a consummate womanizer. Flirt. Something. She still couldn’t quite get a handle on what to label him and maybe that was the problem—he defied labels and all of her expectations too.

Had she completely misjudged him? And if so, did that mean she was being entirely too cautionary about giving him a chance? What if she was the woman fated to change the course of his life and she was too busy doubting herself to let that happen?