“I’ve only ever had one someone special, Clara, and she turned me off to the whole idea of ever having another.” He wouldn’t look at me as he talked. “So no, there’s not someone special in my life to care what I do or who I do it with.”
He tipped his chin good-bye at Tom as he headed toward me. I scrambled off of the stool, trying not to sway in place when I stood. I wasn’t short—in fact, I was taller than average for a woman—but standing a foot across from Boone Cavanaugh, I felt very small. Almost like he could squish me between his thumb and index fingers.
“Ten thousand dollars? Seven days?” He shuffled a step closer, putting himself so close that if I kept swaying in place, I was going to sway right into his arms. That shouldn’t have seemed like such an appealing option.
I nodded because I couldn’t form any words I trusted to say out loud—because I’d just been hit by a familiar scent. One I’d tried to delete from my memory, and one I knew I never could. Boone smelled like my childhood. Like the best years of my life in Charleston. Salty from sweat, sweet from his mom’s and sister’s shampoo he used to use instead of buying something more manly, and sour with the reminder of the past. I wanted to bury my face in his shirt and breathe him in until I’d had my fill, but if this next week was ever going to work, I couldn’t let past feelings and history bleed into the picture.
I couldn’t wreck him again—and I couldn’t let him wreck me again.
Distance. Arm’s length. Collected, cool, and calm. That was my marching beat for the next week. Boone and I had started out as friends; we could do it again.
My vision was blurry from the shots, the background of the bar hazy and undefined. The only thing I could see clearly was him.
His hand lifted, moving toward my face. Just when I thought he was about to cup my cheek and kiss me, his fingers grasped a chunk of my hair swinging just above my shoulders. He studied it for a moment like he didn’t recognize it. After a minute more of that, he leaned in, dropping his mouth to just outside my ear. He was messing with me. I knew that. It wasn’t enough that I was paying him ten grand; he was going to cost me more by the end of this.
“You’ve got yourself a boyfriend. Temporarily,” he whispered, his voice raising bumps on my forearms.
Lifting my shoulders, I cleared my head and slowly shoved him back until he was an arm’s length away. “A plus one. Temporarily.”
What was I doing? What was I thinking? What had I gotten myself into?
Those were the questions playing on a reel through my mind from the time Boone and I had crawled into the taxi until now, when we were a mile away from Abbott Manor, my childhood home.
I shouldn’t have drunk so much. I should have shot out of my stool and left the moment I noticed Boone Cavanaugh a few stools down. I should have never opened my mouth. I shouldn’t have asked him a certain question I knew he couldn’t say no to. I shouldn’t have stepped into that decrepit train car in the first place. No, I shouldn’t have gotten on that damn plane this morning and flown down here.
I shouldn’t have . . . it was the theme of my day, most of my life, and most certainly the rest of the week.
“So what’s our story?”
I jumped when Boone nudged me. After I’d climbed into the cab and told the driver I was ready, not another word had been spoken. I guessed, like myself, Boone was second-guessing his decision.
“What story?” I replied.
“Our love story? The one we’re going to tell your family after they come out of their shock comas and want to know how you and I, living across the country from each other and ignoring each other like we were sworn enemies for close to a decade, wound up together again?” He nudged me again with his arm. “That story.”
Boone was large enough to take up a good half of the backseat, but he’d always taken up the space of a man twice that size, as evidenced from the way his legs were spread so far; his knee kept bumping the outside of my leg even when I was pressed up against my door. When we hit a rut in the road and his knee thumped my leg with enough force that I felt it travel up my thigh and down my calf, I pressed tighter into the door.
“Oh, our story . . . I guess I haven’t really thought that part out yet.” We’d need a story, and I knew that story couldn’t be formulated tonight. Not with my brain marinating in a tequila bath.
“Really? You’ve got nothing?”
“I’ve got nothing tonight. I’ll have it all ironed out come morning though, I promise.”
Boone grunted and stared out his window. “You really didn’t think this whole thing out very well, did you?”
“It was more a spur-of-the-moment type of decision.”