Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,12
right away.”
“I usually watch mindless TV for a while when I get home. This is as good as any. So don’t leave on my account.”
“Are you calling Crystal Palace versus Man City mindless?”
He quirked a smile. “I would never do that.”
They watched in silence for a few minutes until she said, “Benjamin?”
“Mmm?” He was getting sleepy.
“Are we having a truce?”
“It would appear so.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Bang, bang, bang.
Maya jolted awake in her bed, startled by a sudden pounding on her door.
“What the hell?” came a voice from nearby—a rough, gravelly, masculine voice. And it was very nearby.
Oh. My.
The pounding wasn’t on her door, and she wasn’t in her bed. She was on Benjamin’s couch, and someone was at his door.
She’d fallen asleep, and so had he, judging from the wild look in his eyes—his eyes that were inches from her own. He had the prettiest green eyes. They were the exact color of the moss that grew on the town gazebo, and they were bracketed by laugh lines of the sort that a person got when he was funny and friendly—to other people—and expressive.
It was annoying.
Bang, bang, bang.
Right. This was not the time to be admiring Benjamin’s eyes. “Get up,” she whisper-yelled. Somehow, though they had been sitting on opposite ends of the couch last night, now they were tangled up together, sort of half sitting, half lying on the sofa.
“I can’t until you get off me,” he “yelled” back, tapping her calves. Mortifyingly, her legs were stretched out on his lap.
His hands resting on her bare ankles suddenly felt like brands. She snatched her legs back. “What time is it?”
He glanced at his watch. “Ten thirty.”
Holy crap. “No one can know I’m here,” she said urgently.
“No shit.”
“Thanks a lot.” All she’d meant was that the old folks couldn’t catch wind of this. They would not accept the entirely innocent and entirely true we-fell-asleep-watching-football excuse, and she would have to spend the next year dodging their matchmaking attempts.
He placed his finger against his lips to signal for quiet as he smoothed his hair, which was sticking out at all angles in a way that was difficult not to find adorable. He disappeared through the dining room, and she could hear him sliding the dead bolt on the door. She went to the kitchen and pressed her ear to the door to eavesdrop.
“How’d you get in?” she heard him say.
“You gave me a key when I was building your pizza oven.” It was Jake. Strange. She hoped he was okay. As they’d been discussing last night, this time of year was hard for him.
“Right,” Benjamin said. “What can I do for you?”
“I know this is going to sound weird, but can you make me a pizza? Like, an uncooked one that I can finish at home?”
“Let’s go downstairs,” Benjamin said.
Why did Jake want a pizza at ten thirty in the morning on New Year’s Eve? They had just been talking about how Jake didn’t do New Year’s.
The more immediate question, though, was, Should she try to make a getaway while they were downstairs? In the winter, Benjamin’s pizza making moved into a small, conventional indoor oven in a tiny kitchen he had carved out of the back of the bar.
In the end she decided an escape attempt was too risky, so she went back to the living room to wait—and to ask herself what the hell had happened to her judgment. Why had she allowed herself to fall asleep here? Why had she come up here to begin with? Had she lost her mind? She and Benjamin argued. That was how they interacted. She was comfortable with that. She wasn’t comfortable cozying up on the couch with him in his apartment. Well, she was comfortable in a literal sense, because the dude really did have the best couch, the nicest apartment. She had pared her own life so close to the bone that being in a warm, cozy, welcoming place like this was so soothing. But she was existentially uncomfortable.
Benjamin was only gone a few minutes. When she heard him come in, she gathered her stuff and met him in the kitchen.
“That was Jake,” he said. “He wanted a pizza.”
“I heard.”
“And he wanted pineapple on it.”
“That’s Nora’s topping.” Curious.
“I know. But Nora’s in Toronto, right?”
“As far as I know. They have been getting kind of chummy lately, though, don’t you think?” Maya had assumed it was platonic, as Nora, who had recently been dumped in spectacular