himself tangled up in the first place, but, fact of the matter was . . . he was tangled.
“We should get you over to the B&B,” he said, stepping over to open the passenger side door to the truck.
“Yes. I appreciate the help. Sorry I cost you the evening of work on your boat.”
Dylan didn’t respond to that. He was pissed off that they’d somehow gone from sharing kisses that burned a man alive to this quasi-polite, let’s-be-friends bullshit. Admittedly, he’d shifted them to it with his nonresponse to her comments and his let’s-hurry-up-and-go reaction. If he had a rational thought in his head, friends are exactly what they should be. What he wanted them to be, anyway. The rest of it, he wanted to chalk up to momentary insanity, and only because he couldn’t quite get away with blaming her for instigating the whole thing with her voodoo crazy mind meld crap. One thing he knew for certain was that she didn’t want what had happened to have happened, either.
Since she looked relieved and not at all pissed off, he’d evidently made the right move in stepping back. Done the right thing, for once. So why was he so damn angry about it? Because she was being all rational and he felt anything but?
He rolled down the bay door with a jerk and went about locking up, trying to quash his unreasonable temper and get them out of there. A good night’s sleep, another hot day’s work, and he’d put the whole episode behind him. She was officially Lani, Morgan, and Kit’s problem.
He jangled the shop keys from his pocket and locked the back door. “Thank you for sticking by me.” He swore under his breath as her words replayed through his mind. He didn’t want to stick by her. Or anyone else. He was done sticking to people. These days, he stuck to tangible things, dependable things, things he could replace; his business, his home, his boat, and, okay, a damn dog . . . but that was it.
He paused, just for a moment, took a short breath and gathered himself. He was going to climb in the truck, get her to the B&B, go home. Then he was going to fix her car, hand it off . . . and they were done. She was leaving, anyway. Going back, he supposed, to Oregon. Couldn’t say as he blamed her. It’s what he’d have done.
You mean hide? his little voice prodded him.
I’m not hiding, dammit. I’m simply living my life on my own terms. And no one else’s. End of story.
Tired of his own thoughts, he checked the bay door, then turned to his truck. Only to discover she was still standing beside it.
He was tempted to walk past her, bark an order for her to get in, and get the night the hell over with.
But then she went and said, “Why did you kiss me?”
He stopped dead in his tracks—mostly because the parts of his body that had finally calmed down surged right back to life again, hearing her say the word.
“Was it some kind of test?” she asked, her tone sincere rather than defensive, as if she was honestly trying to figure it out.
He walked over to the truck, stopped just beside the open passenger door. “I kissed you for all the reasons a man wants to kiss a woman.”
“You’re not attracted to me,” she said simply, matter-of-factly.
He surprised himself by smiling at that. “Tell that to my body.” He couldn’t quite believe he’d said that out loud. He might not come from a spiffy family tree like Westlake, but he generally was capable of not being crude.
Thankfully, she was lady enough to keep her gaze pinned on his face, though, even in the dull glow of the yellow security bulb, he could see her face flush.
“That’s a physiological response. What I meant was, you’re not attracted to me as a person. You don’t just think I’m crazy, you know I am. At least it’s got to seem that way to you. You strike me as the kind of guy who keeps to himself, and I imagine you like your partners to be colorful, but not . . . you know.”
He stepped closer then, and stopped even trying to rationalize the why of it. She was hardly a flame and he was hardly a moth, and yet . . .
“You put the crazy label on in big bold letters before others can do it for you.