the same. I, uh, Helga gave me yours—for when I was picking you up this morning,” he added lamely.
The server brought their bill just then, along with the to-go order, and Jake swiped up the tab before Vivien even had a chance to take a look at it. “My treat,” he said.
“Jake—”
“Pop insisted. Argue with him, all right?”
When they walked out to his car, Jake paused as he opened the passenger door for her. He had a contemplative look on his face. “You never did tell me what song you were singing in my shower yesterday.”
He was standing very close to her, and Vivien’s heart gave a traitorous thump. God, he was so dark and sexy with all that thick hair blowing in the light breeze and his intense eyes and that amazing mouth she’d been trying not to notice all night…but it was definitely the negroni that was making her head feel light and the rest of her all warm and sizzling and not him. It couldn’t be him.
She gave him a saucy look. “I was singing ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.’ Obviously.”
“Obviously,” he murmured, and she recognized the look in his eyes a heartbeat before he moved in.
His hands, warm and callused, cupped her face, his thumbs brushing her cheeks. His hips bumped against hers, pinning her lightly against the car as he eased closer, holding her gaze. “But did it work?” he whispered, his breath warm against her mouth. He gently nibbled the top of her parted lips, sliding his tongue lightly along the sensitive underside. “Let’s find out.”
Vivien shivered as she stepped into the kiss and met his mouth—an event that was both wildly, terribly familiar and at the same time new and different.
And hot.
So hot.
He still tasted like Jake, with an underscore of wine and coffee—and he felt the same against her, felt right and comfortable, and yet there were so many things that weren’t the same, because it had been so long and they were so different…and there was so much that had happened since then.
“I think I need stronger shampoo,” she murmured against his mouth when he eased away to catch his breath. “Industrial strength.”
His smile brushed her lips, then he kissed her gently at the corner of her mouth. “Won’t work,” he said, then, sliding his hands down along her arms, he stepped back. His gaze was shadowed as he looked down at her, but his words were firm and clear: “I’ve never stopped loving you, VL. No shampoo is going to change that.”
And, having dropped that megaton bomb, he walked around to the other side of the car and got in.
Chapter Sixteen
Vivien was quiet on the ride back to Wicks Hollow. She was still tingling from that volcanic kiss, and still reeling from his gigantic pronouncement.
How could that be?
And what was she supposed to do about it?
In an effort to not think about yet another upset in her life, she spent some of the drive scrolling through the emails and messages on her tablet, responding to clients. The trendy fashion company GetBack Togs had green-lit the proposal for Louise London’s social media posts, and so that project would soon be in full swing, and that meant a nice little payday for Vivien (and a much bigger one for Louise) in a few months.
She tried not to think about the man sitting next to her, whose strong, capable hands managed the drive while he spoke to his sisters again via speaker in the car. The siblings apparently needed one last assurance that their father was going to be all right overnight (although Mathilda seemed put out that Jake wasn’t going to stay at the hospital with him).
Instead of stewing over the way Jake had felt and tasted, plastered up against her—and what he’d said—she found it easier to mull over the few minutes when she and Ricky DeRiccio had been alone in the hospital room. Jake had stepped out, ostensibly to take a call on his cell, but she suspected he wanted a few private words with the attending physician and the nurse on the floor.
“Bring that chair closer,” Mr. DeRiccio had ordered Vivien. “I got something I wanna ask you, and I don’t need the whole floor to hear it.”
The chair legs scraped over the floor as she drew closer to him. The welts from his bee stings had subsided significantly and now just looked like a splattering of zits. Having eaten his fill of osso bucco,