“I need your help, Remi,” he said, resenting like hell the roughened quality to his voice. Clearing his throat, he continued, “This is going to sound...odd, but... Will you be my woman?”
Her face went blank. “Excuse me?” she whispered.
His words played through his head, and he slashed a hand through the air between them. “Hold on, let me rephrase. Will youpretendto be my woman?Pretend.”
Relief and another, more complicated, murkier emotion wavered in her expression. He peered at her. The need to delve deeper prickled at his scalp.
But that damn curiosity. That protectiveness.
He backpedaled away from her secrets like they had detonators and a steadily ticking clock attached to them.
“Maybe you should start at the beginning.” She leveled an inscrutable glance on him, then turned and continued walking down the sidewalk.
Resuming his pace next to her, he huffed out a dry chuckle. “I don’t know how to relay this without looking like a dick.” Stuffing his hands into the pockets of his coat, he continued, “I don’t think it’s a secret around here that I...took Tara Merrick out a few times.”
“I believe the word you’re struggling to find isdate,” she drawled.
He arched an eyebrow. “And I believedateis too strong a word,” he shot back. “I took her to the movies, dinners—a few of those were at my mom’s house so they really don’t count, since she and her mother are my mom’s neighbors—coffee. Nothing serious.”
Remi stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and whipped out her phone. Seconds later, she started tapping on the screen.
“What are you doing?” Frowning, he nudged her to the side, out of the flow of pedestrian traffic.
“I’m pulling up my online dictionary. I mean, I’m just a librarian with a whole reference desk at my disposal, but I’m pretty sure you gave me the very definition of adate. But I want to double-check before I call you out. I so hate being wrong.”
“Smart-ass,” he growled, snatching the cell from her hand and tucking it back in her coat pocket.
His cock perked up at the mere mention of her fantastic ass even as he hungered to press his thumb to the plush bottom curve of her mouth and come away smeared with her deep red lipstick.
“And for your information,” he said, voice lower, heavier, unable to scrub that image of her smeared lips from his mind. “It isn’t a date when I’m up-front from the beginning that I’m not looking for any kind of attachment, and I warn her not to expect anything to come out of it. We were just two people enjoying each other’s company while I was in town for the weekend. Nothing more. I was very clear about that.”
I always am. I always will be.
She tilted her head to the side, her long dark red waves spilling over her shoulder. “Then why bother?”
“Because...” Declan turned, strode off, and the sweet scent of butterscotch and the aroma of almonds assured him she followed. “It made my mother happy. And after years of rarely seeing her smile after my father died, giving her a reason to didn’t seem like much of a sacrifice on my part.”
Silence beat between them, filled by the chatter of passersby and the low hum of Rose Bend’s version of Friday-night traffic.
“That kind of detracts from your dick status,” she finally murmured.
He glanced at her, a smile tugging at his mouth. “Thank you... I think.”
“That’s why you bought a house here, too, isn’t it?” She slid him a look, and the too-knowing gleam trickled down his spine like an ice cube. “Mrs. Howard moved to Rose Bend three years ago, but you didn’t buy a house here until last year. You’re only in town every other weekend—really you could stay with her. There was no need for you to buy a house. But you did it so she would feel like she had family here. So she had her son here.”
He shrugged, not liking this feeling of... Vulnerability. Of being so easily read like one of the books at her library.
“It was nothing. Like I said earlier, I need my space. And what little privacy she allows me.” He smiled, even if it was wry. “Which brings me back to why I need you.” Lust struck a match against the kindling of need in his gut, flaring into flames at his choice of words. He deliberately doused them. “After our...display at the library, Tara seemed to finally back off.”
“Not how I saw it,” Remi muttered under her breath, but he caught it.
“True, she chased me out of there, but when I told her we were involved, and what she saw was me being dead serious about what I’d been telling her for the past two weeks—which is that there would be no more movies, no more dinners—the truth seemed to sink in. But I’m not fooling myself into believing it will stick. Not if I don’t follow it up with reinforced behavior. Otherwise, she’ll convince herself kissing you was a fluke, and I didn’t mean it when I said she and I were over.” He rubbed his hand over his jaw, his five-o’clock scruff scratching his palm. “That we were never a ‘we’ to begin with.”
“So you want me as your beard to run her off?”
He frowned. Her bland tone didn’t hint that he’d offended her. Neither did her perfunctory summation. Yet, he still got the sense he had.
“My beard?” he repeated. “No, I wouldn’t put it that way—”
