A Time for Us - By Amy Knupp Page 0,51

him a little. Maybe more than a little.

“My single glass of wine had nothing to do with being too bored or miserable or whatever you were thinking. What else?”

“What else?”

“Ah, the watch. I was keeping track of how long until I needed to put sunscreen on. More than sixty minutes and I would burn to a crisp, but I wanted to get some color as well as some vitamin D.”

“Makes perfect sense,” he mumbled, feeling like a chastised kindergartner. He suspected he deserved it.

“I think...” She cut herself off as she narrowed her eyes at him. She clenched her jaw and looked away. Leaned forward as she collected her bag. “We’ve tried this, Cale. This friendship thing. It’s not working. You’re a good person, but I think you’re looking too hard to find my sister in me. I don’t think we should ‘hang out,’ as you put it, anymore.”

She opened the door and lowered her right foot to the running board.

“Thanks for dragging me along today,” she said. With that, she slid down from the high seat, shut the door and walked off without looking back at him.

Cale’s mouth hung open as he watched her go up the stairs at the back of the garage and disappear into the main level of the house.

She didn’t want to see him again?

And the thing that unnerved him the most was the way the bottom seemed to drop out of his gut. It was as if...almost as if she’d broken up with him. But they hadn’t been together. Would never be together.

His disappointment was way out of proportion, verging on ridiculous. As he’d made so readily apparent, he didn’t even know her that well. Not the real Rachel Culver.

Feeling as if his head was spinning, he glanced up at the living-room windows and realized her face was there, peering out at him for a moment before disappearing.

He quickly shoved the Sport Trac into gear and drove away, not wanting her to know she’d left him reeling, sitting there like a dejected hound with his mouth hanging open.

He pointed the truck toward home—his sister’s home, technically—and wondered when he’d become such a pretender. Inexplicably, he recalled the time when he was eight years old and had been called out for having an imaginary friend he’d insisted to his mom was real.

What the hell?

He’d thought he’d been doing so well with his grief, working through it, feeling a little better with every passing month. But he was still camped out at his sister’s house and now... Was Rachel right? Had he been trying to see Noelle in her, as she’d accused?

Cale shook his head. “Hell no.” He said the words out loud and then repeated them, louder still.

He damn well knew the difference between the woman who had been his fun-loving, easygoing fiancée and her serious, uptight sister. He’d been going out of his way to be nice to Rachel, in fact. And this was what he got in return?

He’d known the two women were opposites from the night he’d first met them at a party. Rachel had been cowering outside in the shadows while Noelle was in the middle of a group in the kitchen, egging on one of his buddies in drinking tequila shots. Noisy, laughing, happy. Bubbling over with her joie de vivre. She made the people around her feel good just by being herself.

And today, as Rachel had pointed out, he’d not particularly enjoyed himself, all because he was worried about her having a good time.

Opposites.

Rachel was introverted and scary-smart. So smart, as her overly technical—not to mention gruesome—conversation with Scott Pataki at lunch had emphasized, that sometimes she made people feel as though she could think circles around them.

She wasn’t exactly spontaneous, as her severe hesitation this morning when he’d invited her out had proven, and she wasn’t a wizard in the kitchen. Far from it, judging by her reaction to her mom’s insistence on baking. She was far more concerned about her career. Single-minded in her ambition, as a matter of fact, to the extent that her supervisor had to cut her off from taking too many extra shifts. What room did that leave for relationships?

He whipped into his parking space at the apartment building, turned off the engine and swore crudely.

Where had that last thought come from? Relationships? What did he care what the repercussions of Rachel’s drive and personality were on a relationship?

The last thing he wanted out of life right now—and for the foreseeable future—was a