Not that she’d had copious amount of legendary sex. Or even average amounts of average sex. Aside from a few hookups, Rickhad been her first real boyfriend. But neither the hookups nor the ostensibly romantic sex with the man Sierra thought shemaybe could love—eventually—came anywhere close to the near-orgasmic rush she’d gotten from having Flynn Maguire brush herhair.
“You’re awfully quiet.” Flynn’s voice cut into her thoughts. Startled, her elbow slipped off where it’d been propped on thewindow. Because yes, she’d been half-hanging out of that open car window to keep from staring at Flynn. Watching the pinetrees blur together seemed safer than indulging in stealing extra glances of him.
“So are you.” Which was actually normal.
He didn’t do small talk. Nor meaningless chitchat. Flynn was polite to customers. But he only said something above and beyondthe bare minimum if it really mattered. Sierra liked that. That he didn’t spout nonsense all day. Or try to schmooze everyone in his path like a bad car salesman.Like Rick used to. No, when Flynn spoke, you knew—whether big or small—it was the truth.
Flynn’s truth was almost sexier than his forearms. Which was an extremely high bar.
In a low voice, he said, “I don’t know what to say to you.”
His honesty—although most people would probably interpret his words as an insult—merely intrigued Sierra with its strangeness.“Why not?”
“We work together. But now I’m driving you home. Like we’re . . . something more. Which wouldn’t be right.”
Ouch. The truth of that stung. For probably a very different reason than he had, Sierra knew that they shouldn’t expand beyondtheir friendship. Although Sierra didn’t really want to be just Flynn’s friend. Unless “friend” now also meant “person I’d like to take to bed and not surface again until we run out ofcondoms.”
With equal parts defensiveness and wishful thinking, Sierra said, “We’re already friendly.”
“We’re colleagues,” he corrected. “I’m not used to being friendly with the people who work for me.”
For him? Whoa.
Sierra darned well wouldn’t let a man walk all over her. Not again, anyway. “I don’t recall being supplied with an org chart when I got the job, but I’m pretty sure that I report to Carlos.As do you,” she said pointedly.
“Sorry.”
“That’s it?” For once, Flynn’s lack of elaboration bugged her. Maybe because this time it was personal.
“What more do you want?”
Sooo much more. Kisses. Tender touches. For Flynn to turn the same intensity that darkened his eyes when he invented a personalizedcocktail on to her. To see him shirtless. To see him naked. Basically everything.
Everything that could lead to exposure and danger. So everything she couldn’t let herself have.
Sierra shifted to look at him. He didn’t sound exasperated. The eyebrow closest to her was arched up, as though Flynn genuinelywanted to know. She had nothing to lose by telling him. Well, not by telling him the naked thing. Just what more she wantedfrom his actual apology.
“Maybe an explanation of why you think I work for you, instead of with you. Sure, the customers wouldn’t get the drinks if you didn’t make them. But they also wouldn’t getthe drinks you made unless I delivered them. If anything, we work in a perfectly synchronous balance.”
“I don’t.”
His clipped delivery could have shut her down. Sierra Williams was not known—in her other, real life, the life before—for pushing. For poking at people. No, she avoided uncomfortable situations and conflict as much as possible. Even more sonow that she worked so hard to go unnoticed by everyone except this man, who seemed to be able to look straight into her.
Ergo, this dangerous man.
But if they were going to keep working together, Sierra wanted to know that Flynn valued her. At least as a colleague. “Youdon’t think what we do has balance?”
“I don’t think you work for me. It was a slip of the tongue.” Flynn canted his head away from her. His wrist still hung looselyover the steering wheel, but every other muscle she could see in the bright moonlight was tensed to near steel. “I ran a company,before. I got used to thinking of myself in that role. Sometimes habit takes over. I speak before remembering that everything’schanged.”
“Everything?” Now Sierra was intrigued.
Her entire life had turned upside down. As she went through that topsy-turviness, she’d realized that it was indeed rare forabsolutely everything to change all at once. Rare and hard. And lonely. And had she mentioned hard? It would certainly be nice to unload some of that onto someone who’d gone through the same thing.
Not that she could tell him. Not when keeping her secret might very well be the only thing keeping her alive.
“You know.” He shrugged one massive, muscled wall of a shoulder. “Different job. Different town. It’s an adjustment.”
At the Gorse, they chatted about their jobs. Joked about quirky/difficult customers. Talking to Flynn was a way to relax,to let go of her hunched-over shoulders and endless worries for a few minutes.
But they rarely revealed anything personal. Like there was an unspoken agreement not to talk about themselves. Now that Flynn had opened that door a crack? Sierra wanted to ask a million questions.
On the other hand, she absolutely did not want any of those questions volleyed back at her. Questions like why’d she moved here, why’d she left her old home, what lifeshe’d left behind.
In the three months she’d been in Bandon, it had been excruciatingly hard to hide all of that. People here were friendly.Inquisitive. In a good way, but one that made it difficult to sidestep without being rude. So she kept her mouth shut. Keptto herself.
And Sierra was so very tired of it.
So lonely.
This conversation with Flynn was one of the longest non-work-related talks she’d had since moving here. Heck, since fleeingWisconsin in the middle of the night seven months ago. Sierra ached to have
