“No. I didn’t have the nerve…then.”
He was most definitely calling her bluff. Their mouths were only a couple of inches apart—and Jamie hoped her wry smile gave no clue to the way her heart was racing. “What about now?” she asked, the huskiness in her voice not entirely feigned.
“Now…” She felt his breath brush her lips, and her mouth tingled in anticipation. There was a momentary hesitation, and then Trevor drew back, slowly, breaking the contact between them. “I still don’t have the nerve,” he murmured.
She sighed in regret—and she was only partially teasing. “Pity.”
He reached behind her to open the car door for her. “Drive carefully. And watch your speed.”
“No problem,” she quipped, pleased to note that her voice sounded steady—at least to her own ears. “I’ve tested my limits enough this evening, I think.”
Trevor stepped back without answering. She slid into the car, started the engine and drove away. She glanced only once in the rearview mirror. Just long enough to see that Trevor was still standing there. Watching her.
HE COULD STILL FEEL her fingertips against his jaw. He could still feel the warmth of her lithe, vibrant body standing so close to his. He could still hear the echo of her husky laugh, like a brush of feathers against his nerve endings.
Trevor downed the single shot of bourbon he allowed himself each day and set the glass aside, his movements unhindered by the near-total darkness in the room. He was
used to sitting in his living room alone in the dark, long after the children were in bed. Many nights he sat there resisting an urge to pour another drink—and brooding about Melanie. Remembering the satisfying, if somewhat unexciting, relationship he’d thought they had. Mourning the loss of the woman he had once loved and the illusions she had shattered. Facing a future that bore little resemblance to the one he’d envisioned when he had married her.
Tonight he found himself thinking of Jamie, instead.
It was still hard for him to believe how close he’d come to acting like an awkward adolescent outside his parents’ door earlier. He was a grown man, a widower, the father of two children, and still Jamie had brought him perilously near stammering incoherence—with only a brush of her fingers and that soft, sexy laugh. They seemed to have little more in common now than they’d had as teenagers—and yet he still found himself tempted to duck behind the high-school gym with her.
She had always had the strangest effect on him. He would have thought he’d outgrown it by now.
Apparently, he hadn’t.
NEARLY EVERYONE in Honoria dined at Cora’s Café, at least occasionally. One of the last establishments still thriving in the old section of downtown, it was within walking distance of city hall, the police station, the bank and a few small businesses, so the daily lunch trade was brisk.
Jamie was swept with nostalgia when she entered the café for lunch with her accountant on the Friday after her dinner with the McBrides. The place looked the same as it had fifteen years ago, she thought, looking around at the crowded tables with their red-and-white-checked coverings. The same cheap prints hung on the walls, though they were considerably more faded now, and the same old noisy cash register was still in use at the front checkout. No computerized register for this place—and they didn’t take plastic.
Heavyset, frizzy-permed Mindy Hooper greeted Jamie at the door. Mindy had gone to work for Cora straight out of high school—almost ten years before Jamie’s own graduation—and had been there ever since. She hadn’t changed much during those years; now fast approaching forty, Mindy was slow-moving, broad-bottomed, plainspoken and apparently content with the sameness of her daily routine. “Hey, Jamie. I wondered when you were going to come see us again.”
“It’s good to be back, Mindy. Does Cora still make the best chocolate pie in the state?”
“Best chocolate pie in the world,” Mindy replied, wryly patting her wide hip. “I’m waddling testimony to that.”
Jamie laughed. “Is Clark Foster here yet? I’m meeting him for lunch.”
“No, not yet. You go ahead and get a table and I’ll send him your way when he comes in.”
“Great. And when you get a minute, I’ll have a glass of iced tea. It’s already hot out.”
“Just wait until summer really kicks in,” Mindy predicted with cheery pessimism. “’Bout melted the dash in my car last August.”
Since Georgians loved nothing more than complaining about the weather, Jamie murmured something sympathetic before heading for a nearby free table. She saw several people she knew, of course, and stopped on the way to exchange pleasantries. Cora’s was almost as bad as the discount store when it came to being seen. Hardly a place for a discreetly anonymous tryst, she thought humorously as she took her seat. Not that there was anyone she was thinking of seeing on the sly at the moment, she added.
A balding, soft-middled businessman in his late thirties pulled out the chair across the table from her. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Traffic was a bear.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Traffic? In Honoria?”
“Okay, it was old Mrs. Tucker,” he admitted. “Driving five miles an hour right down the middle of Main Street.”
She laughed. “Driving that big old car of hers? The one that looks as if it’s driving itself because she’s too short to be seen over the dashboard?”
“Yeah. She’s had that car since before we were born, I think, and it might have all of twenty thousand miles on it by now.”
“Most of them from driving down the middle of Main Street, right?”