SLOW PLAY (7-Stud Club #4) - Christie Ridgway Page 0,24

and then she’d gone away. In fact, she’d applied for the teaching position without discussing it with him at all and then presented the whole plan of her Sawyer Beach escape with a smile pasted on her face. Fait accompli.

Don’t think about the past, Kelly, he reminded himself. Focus forward.

“We probably don’t need to stay longer,” Harper said now, shifting on the seat as if she felt the tension growing too. “I’m betting the thieves won’t show.”

“But you said they hit around midnight.” It wasn’t near that yet.

“If anyone was out here, don’t you think your possum hunt would have put them off?”

Not if they rolled up now.

But he grasped at the opportunity to shut down the stakeout and separate himself from her beguiling company. “Maybe you’re right. I, uh, need to get up early tomorrow. I have plans to paint my house.”

“You have a house. Wow. All grown-up.”

“I bought it from my grandparents,” he said. “They retired to Hawaii.”

“So you’re going to spend tomorrow painting.”

“First I’m going on a run,” he added. “I’m thinking of training for a marathon.” A thought he’d just made up right now, but it seemed an activity that was future-forward and would keep his mind and body occupied when Harper departed.

“You’re very industrious,” she said, starting the truck. It bounced over the ruts in the single-track dirt road and the squeak of the old shocks saved them from more conversation.

Once on the smooth pavement that led toward town, Harper glanced over. “I don’t run,” she said. “But I was into hot yoga for a while.”

“Oh, yeah?” He tried not to imagine her long legs and slender torso bending and twisting. Twisting and bending.

Now that they were closer to town, where he’d left his car in the lot of Harry’s, the streetlight illuminated her face. “But I had to quit the yoga. Made me too sweaty.”

He barely suppressed a groan, imaging those long legs and slender torso heated and damp. “You should try taking up something else then. Fencing. In a suit of armor.” His imagination put her into clunky metal.

There. Better.

He breathed easier until she took an unexpected turn. “Where are you going?” Looking back, he pointed. “Coffee place. My car. That direction.”

“A little turn down a memory lane or two first. I haven’t had a chance to do much exploring. You don’t mind, do you?”

Hell, yes, he minded!

But he remained silent while she steered past the elementary school, and then the municipal pool and tennis courts. The locals’ favorite beach was moonlit, the sand glowing silver, and he recalled a hundred volleyball and touch football games. As she made it to the high school, he thought of Homecoming and Friday night dances and that time he made out with Ellen McDonald in the stands at the baseball diamond.

All memories that didn’t include Harper.

There might have even been a smile on his face, with all the harmless reminiscing. Emily McDonald went on to be valedictorian and then some bigwig executive in an athleisure wear company. Still, he remembered her best for rocking his world when he was fifteen and she was seventeen. Closing his eyes, he recalled the flavor of her strawberry lip gloss.

Maybe he nodded off. But he came quickly awake again when Harper braked. The truck rocked, she turned off the engine, and then its tick was the only sound in the silence of the night.

His gaze took in their surroundings.

An invisible hand closed over his throat. “What are we doing here?” he choked out. Of course he knew exactly where “here” was, their own personal make-out spot, a dead-end road on a bluff overlooking the Pacific.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she said, her hand gesturing out the windshield. “Look at the moon reflected in the ocean.”

He gave it a cursory glance. They’d never visited here for the view.

Or he hadn’t, anyway.

“There’s no ocean in Vegas,” she said.

“I bet they have a moon.”

“Not a Sawyer Beach moon.” A sigh.

The first time he’d brought her here had been at the end of their first official date. He’d done the group thing a couple of times—attended a beach bash, dropped in at the Daggett residence when he knew Sophie had her good friend Harper over—then invited her to dinner and the movies.

He didn’t remember what they ate and what they watched but he would never forget their first kiss. Him, tender. Her, tentative. At the taste of her, his heart had dropped to his stomach and then shot back up, pounding within the cage of his