Everyone knew a volcano was dangerous.
Yet here she was. Pressed against the masculine equivalent.
She felt his fingers move where he was holding her, his palm on her lower back. She was acutely aware of the shift. Of the way his calloused skin caught against the silken fabric of her dress.
Her breath caught in her throat in response.
She couldn’t not think of him as a man.
Jonathan had been a symbol. Of a moment, a rebellion, an opportunity. An experience.
Logan was a man.
She’d watched the way women acted with him.
She’d…
He gripped her hand just a bit tighter. His thumb moved over her knuckles. That didn’t seem like a strictly necessary part of the dance.
The song ended, and she stepped back on an exhale.
“Okay, I’m tired. I didn’t get a nap in earlier,” she said.
He looked at her long and hard. “All right, we’ll head back.”
She nodded. “Yeah. I… Yeah.”
She looked over at the table she’d shared with Jonathan to find it empty, a check with a long white receipt sticking out of the top.
“Let me just make sure he paid,” she said.
She walked over to the table and picked up the little leather bifold and saw that he had indeed paid and signed. She’d found a unicorn. A man who’d actually just been nice for nothing. At least, that was what reading about the dating scene had led her to believe. Not that it had been a date.
“Good to go,” she said, straightening and walking through the courtyard with Logan, keeping a few feet of distance between them.
The car was parked at the far end of the lot.
“Why did you…why did you come here? Did you need to order dinner or…”
“I came because you said you were here. I didn’t like the idea of you being here alone.”
“Why?”
“Reasons like the one I walked in one.”
“Me dancing with a perfectly nice man?”
“A stranger.”
“Oh, so all the women you hook up with aren’t strangers?” She hadn’t meant to fire that barb at him, but lord, it had been easy.
As if the years of it had been sitting right there in the back of her mind. The memories of him at a few weddings they’d all been at, him and the bachelorette party girl on Orcas Island. The stories her own husband told.
His admittance of occasional debauchery.
“It’s different and you know it.”
“Every woman who has sex with you is praying to the gods you aren’t a serial killer looking for a new flesh suit, so the fact that you think it’s okay for those women to go out and determine their own risk level but it isn’t okay for me smacks of penile hypocrisy.” She laughed. “And I am sick to death of that.”
