A Match for Celia

“What’s wrong, Celia?”

She looked up quickly in response to his perceptive question. “What do you mean?” she stalled.

“You’ve started frowning. Something I said?”

“No. I was just—umm—thinking.”

“What about?” he persisted.

She sighed. “I should have known not to try to hide anything from you. You and I have been very honest with each other, haven’t we, Reed?”

Something crossed his face—a more suspicious person than she might have called it guilt. She told herself she must be mistaken.

“Er—” he said, then started stirring his own coffee, though he hadn’t put anything in it.

“We have been honest with each other, haven’t we, Reed?” she repeated, watching him closely, suddenly uneasy.

“Stop trying to change the subject. Why were you frowning?”

Maybe she was just trying to change the subject. She made a face and confessed. “I was thinking about that redhead.”

Reed looked confused. “What redhead?”

“The one you had breakfast with yesterday. And then—well, I saw you walking with her. She’s very beautiful.”

“Oh.” A glimmer of amusement flashed through his eyes. “That redhead. Yeah. She’s beautiful.”

“Tall, too.”

“Mmm.”

“She’s certainly in good shape. Probably lifts weights or something.”

“Yeah.” Reed sipped his coffee, then murmured over the rim of his cup, “Nice pecs.”

Celia kicked him beneath the table.

Reed sputtered and laughed. “Sorry—but you made it so easy. She and I went for a short, friendly walk together and then she went to the health club to work out. That’s all there was to it.”

Of course she went to work out, Celia thought as the waitress set her buttery croissant in front of her. Celia hadn’t set foot in the health club, herself. Those machines always looked like instruments of torture to her. “I’m sure she’s very nice,” she muttered after the waitress left the table.

“The redhead? I don’t know. She seemed like a real barracuda to me,” Reed mused, looking amused at a private joke.

Celia thought of kicking him again, then decided to let it go. “Sorry,” she said stiffly. “It’s none of my business, of course. It’s not as if I was jealous or anything.”

“I’ve sure as hell been jealous of Alexander.”

The blunt admission rather surprised Celia, though she’d suspected it. She twisted her napkin in her lap, wondering what to say in response.

As Reed himself had pointed out last night, this was happening very fast between them—whatever it was. They’d known each other such a short time. Less than a week! And yet Celia had been fully prepared to make love with him last night.

She ate in silence for a time, then set her fork down and looked across the little table. She’d already forgotten the dumpy woman across the room—and all the other patrons, as well. She and Reed might have been alone in the crowded little diner, for all the attention she spared her surroundings. “Reed?”

He swallowed the last bite of his croissant. “Yes?”

“I’m a little nervous,” she admitted frankly. “Of—well, of this thing between us. It’s all new for me.”

He reached out to take her hand. “I’m scared as hell,” he said, his expression rueful, his tone sincere. “Trust me, Celia, this is new for me, too.”