Now that she knew her house was okay, a new panic gripped her. Clay and Ellery weren’t close. Oh, sure, they still saw each other when Ellery and Josh went out for drinks or went to watch a football game at a friend’s house, but she knew Ellery still had issues with the boy who’d once wronged her, which made what Daphne had done with him ten times worse. “You shouldn’t have come, Clay.”
“Why not?”
Daphne glanced around to make sure no one could hear. “You know why not.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You’re not even friends with Ellery. You’re here because . . . I’m not sure why you would do this.”
“I told you. I wanted some time away.” He shrugged and averted his eyes.
She got a strange feeling. “Clay, what’s this really about?”
“It’s about you giving me a chance. It’s about you seeing me in a different light.”
“Seeing you in a different light? Clay, we’ve already had this conversation.”
“No, you told me what you thought I want, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I think you’re wrong about us. When Madison told me what y’all were doing, I felt like it was an opportunity. I wanted to show you that I can be what you want.”
“Clay, there’s no us.”
“Because you’ve spent the past two weeks running from what we could have.”
“No, I’ve accepted that what happened was . . . a one and done. You and I just can’t do this. You said it was just sex. Remember?”
Clay contemplated her for a few seconds. “That’s what I thought. But I keep thinking about you, and I think you’ve been thinking about me, too. Only you’ve convinced yourself it won’t work because of what everyone else will say. Especially Ellery. But here’s the deal—why does Ellery get to have whatever she wants, but you have to live like a monk? And the whole age thing is so passé. Who cares?”
Daphne didn’t know how to make him understand that she wasn’t merely hiding from what others thought. She and Clay made no sense. At all. “Clay, you need to think about your future. I’m not your future. You need to date women your own age, girls who want to get married, have babies, and—”
“You’re assuming I want that. Who said I want a picket fence and a playpen of babies? All I want at present is to be with you. I’m asking for a chance, Daph.”
Daphne wanted to press her hand against his mouth, not just because she didn’t want anyone in the restaurant to know her business, but because she didn’t want to hear the words emerging from his mouth. “I don’t know what to say. I can’t even imagine us being . . . in a relationship.”
“Because I’m too young? Or you’re too scared?”
Both. Absolutely both. But she wasn’t going to admit to her fears.
“Go back to Shreveport, Clay,” she said, pushing by him, wondering how her one night of throwing caution to the wind had come back to smack her in the face. Who would have thought a twenty-five-year-old Lothario would want second helpings from a nearly forty-year-old woman?
The thought he’d come to Texas to win her was so ridiculous she wondered if someone was playing a joke on her.
If she could, she’d press rewind and refuse that third—or was it fourth?—glass of wine. Then again, if she were truthful, she would own up to that wine as only an excuse, a bit of liquid courage that allowed her to act on what she’d wanted for weeks. Something hot and needy had bloomed in her, twining itself around the need to feel something. She longed for the stroke of a hand on her hip, the delicious weight of a man pinning her to the bed. To say she needed to get off wasn’t wholly accurate. She’d wanted human connection, too.
But that didn’t mean she wanted a relationship with Clay.
The more important relationship with her daughter was already a tenuous spiderweb in a hurricane of blame, jealousy, and resentment. Oh, these emotions between them were ones she was aware of. What they engaged in was a push and pull of two women trying to find their footing in new lives. Daphne didn’t know how to remove what sat between her and Ellery, but she knew picking up what Clay Caldwell was laying down—no matter how spectacular he was in bed—wasn’t anything that could help.
“Hey, hey,” Clay said, catching her arm. “Stop just a minute, Daphne.”