Page 22 of His to Cherish
She rolled her pretty blue eyes playfully before smiling. “Shush. We all knew there was a tension between you two, and I’ve said it before. But this is different. I think you should proceed…but do it carefully.”
I was too stunned at her admission to speak. I mean, yeah, I thought maybe sometimes Aidan had noticed me before. He’d given me looks that a man gave a woman when he wanted to make an approach. But he’d never acted on them.
I opened my mouth to ask her to explain when I felt it.
A shift in the air.
A tingling that began at the base of my neck and ran down my spine.
It was thick. It was palpable.
And it was directed at me. I felt someone’s eyes on me before I turned around.
It was so severe, such an intense feeling, that my spine stiffened instinctively and I set my glass on the table in front of me.
Slowly, my eyes roamed the restaurant looking for the culprit, for whoever was staring at me, when I saw him.
Aidan.
My eyes widened and my jaw dropped. It was slight, but enough of a motion that it caught Camden’s attention.
“Well,” she drawled, nudging me with her shoulder. “Speak of the devil.”
I snickered even while my heart began to thunder inside my chest.
He was at the bar across the room, elbow on the bar top, standing, facing us. In front of him was a guy with his back to us, sitting on a barstool and clearly talking to Aidan. Aidan didn’t look like he was paying attention to the guy at all.
His focus—his gaze—was directed at me.
I felt a push at my back. “Go talk to him.”
I shook my head, unable to pull my eyes away from Aidan. It was dark in the bar, but I could still make out his features. The tightness of his jaw. His thick black hair hung too long and he needed a haircut, but I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him.
I had dreamed of running my hands through his hair, gripping it, and pulling while he was moving on top of me—inside of me.
“Shit,” I gasped, and turned around. I stared at my margarita glass while I felt all my friends gawking at me along with Aidan’s eyes still on me. I looked up, directly at Suzanne across the table. “He’s here.”
She wiggled her eyebrows. “No shit? Why are you still talking to us?”
It was a challenge, one I wasn’t nearly brave enough to take on.
She dropped her playfulness and shrugged. “Go say hi, at least.”
I wanted to. I could feel the pull to be close to him from across the restaurant and I was curious why he was there. Why his eyes seemed to be daring me to do…something.
Taking a large drink of liquid courage, I finished my margarita, licking the salt from the rim, and stood up.
“All right, all right.” I winked at my friends, feigning bravery I didn’t feel.
“And tell us who the hot guy is next to him!” Suzanne shouted when I pushed away from my barstool. Based on the way heads whipped in her direction, I figured the entire place had heard her.
By the way the hot guy at the bar turned on his barstool and grinned at our table, I was certain that at the very least he had.
“Oh, that’s David,” I heard Trina say as I walked away. “He helped me out in Chicago.”
“Idiots,” I said with a smile as I reached Aidan and the hot guy named David, who I now recognized from being with Aidan at the funeral. My bravery showed up three feet from the bar. “Don’t mind them, the zookeepers don’t let them out in public much.”
The guy, who I would call attractive and definitely cute in a nice-guy kind of way, threw his head back. His easygoing, loud laugh had me laughing with him.
