Sea Glass Island (Ocean Breeze) - By Sherryl Woods Page 0,43
these kids is to bolster their self-confidence, right?”
Though he must have felt the question came out of left field, he didn’t even hesitate. “Absolutely.”
“How can you possibly be any good at helping them when your own self-image is lousy?”
A frown flitted across his face. “My self-confidence is just fine,” he contradicted.
“And yet you can stand there and say that you don’t have enough to offer me or presumably any other woman. If you ask me, that’s your former fiancée talking and we’ve already agreed that she was a jerk.”
Ethan looked startled by the straight talk.
“I’m just being realistic,” he insisted. “For all the things we’ve discovered we have in common, there are still plenty of things that make us a bad match, not the least of which is you needing to figure out what you really want out of life.”
She wanted to tell him that she had figured it out, that she wanted him and a family and a home right here, but how could she? The idea was still too new to her, too far from certain. She let her silence speak for itself, let him think he’d gotten it right because she couldn’t honestly deny that he had.
As they sat on a bench in the glow of the moonlight, he faced her, longing in his eyes. He caressed her cheek, his hand charmingly unsteady. Samantha wanted to capture it, press a kiss to his palm, but she held back.
“You figure things out,” he said quietly. “Then we’ll talk.”
Though the comment offered more hope than anything he’d said before, she wasn’t satisfied with the concession. “Just so you know, in my opinion, talking is highly overrated.”
“And yet you get onstage and deliver lines for a living,” he teased in an obvious attempt to lighten the mood.
“Those are somebody else’s words, someone else’s emotions,” she said. “In the real world, I’m just saying there may be better ways to communicate.”
He draped his arm around her shoulder, warming her when she shivered in the breeze off the ocean. “A topic for another day,” he said. “Let’s just focus on the here and now. You. Me. The moonlight. The sound of the waves. What’s not to love?”
It was more than he’d ever offered before, so she took him up on it. She leaned in to all that solid strength and heat and sighed. “It’s a perfect moment,” she agreed, her voice shaky.
Though there was a very good chance that all this sweet proximity with no payoff just might make her a little crazy.
* * *
Ethan felt as if he’d brushed up against danger and emerged with little more than battle scars as he drove over to Cora Jane’s. He’d wanted everything Samantha had been offering at the beach, wanted it with a level of desire he hadn’t felt even when he’d been engaged. He liked that she challenged his assumptions, liked that she deliberately tempted him, putting her own emotions on the line. The attraction he felt for her had spiked by several heated degrees tonight. But attraction didn’t always last. His engagement had been proof of that. And when it wore off, hearts could get broken. He didn’t want it to be hers any more than he wanted to go through that pain again himself.
He knew he’d spend the lonely hours in his cold bed kicking himself for not giving in, but he also knew he’d still be able to look in the mirror in the morning. Sex would have been easy. Doing the right thing took a toll.
As he parked in Cora Jane’s driveway, he turned to face Samantha. “Any idea what’s on tomorrow’s agenda? Do we have wedding-related duties?”
“Boone’s folks are flying in with their respective spouses. He’s expecting all of us for dinner at the restaurant in the private dining room. Personally, I think we should have eaten in the main dining room with everyone else.”
“Why is that?”
“Have you ever been around both of his parents at the same time? Now that his mom is on her third or fourth husband, they’re barely civil. She always has some snarky comment about his dad’s trophy wife that gets things started. He replies in kind and it pretty much goes downhill from there.”
Ethan winced. “I haven’t crossed paths with them since the divorce years ago, but it sounds like a barrel of laughs. Maybe he should include the Farmers, too, and complete the circle of warring factions.”
“Are you kidding? Emily told me that Boone insisted they be invited to the