He was silent, his features tense. “You must know I’m becoming quite ridiculously infatuated with you.”
She had to catch her breath. In all her life, no man had ever told her such a thing.
“Are...are you?”
His cheeks turned slightly pink. “I know. It’s quite juvenile. You don’t have to say anything. I’m embarrassed enough as it is.”
“You shouldn’t be embarrassed,” she assured him. “If you want the truth, I’m touched that you trusted me enough to tell me. I find it rather sweet.”
She didn’t want to tell him that she had plowed past infatuation the first or second time she met him.
“I suppose sweet is better than pitiable.”
She frowned at his word choice. “I would certainly never pity you. Why would I?”
“Lonely widower goes on vacation with his children where he meets a beautiful woman next door who compels him to promptly make a fool of himself.”
“Are you lonely?” She focused on that word rather than the heat glowing inside her that he would call her beautiful.
“I probably wouldn’t use that word to describe my day-to-day life. I’m too busy to register that I might be lonely. I focus on the children, my family, my work. But yes. At the heart of it, I suppose I am.”
Something inside him called to her, an echo of her own loneliness.
She had been lonely for a long time, long before her mother died and left her alone. She had tried to mask it, to be the life of the party everyone seemed to expect while inside she had yearned most of all for someone to cherish her, to treat her as if what she wanted mattered more than anything else in the world.
Starry-eyed Samantha.
She could almost hear her mother’s strident voice ringing through the house with the familiar words.
“I like you very much, Ian,” she said. “You and your children. I wish I were the sort of woman who wouldn’t mind a bit of, er, dalliance.”
“I understand. Good to know where we both stand.”
“There’s no reason we can’t remain friends. You live next door and we are bound to run into each other here and there.”
She would do her best to make sure she avoided her dock at night. Or finding herself alone with him in a quiet hallway during a thunderstorm.
“I won’t hold you to your invitation from earlier, to be your plus-one at Gemma’s wedding. I would never want to make things awkward for you.”
“You wouldn’t,” he protested.
“You don’t have to worry about me, truly. I’ll be there anyway, fussing over Gemma’s dress. And I suppose your mother’s now, if we can find her a dress design she likes that I can pull off in less than two weeks.”
She tried not to panic at the reminder.
“I would still like to go with you and I know that would make the children happy, too.”
She should tell him no. Spending more time with him was a terrible idea. She had no willpower around him, as the past few moments had amply demonstrated. Despite their conversation, she still wanted to fall right back into his arms.
Didn’t he understand how weak she was, how she should be spending all her time shoring up her defenses around him so she didn’t wind up with a broken heart when he took his adorable children and returned to England?
Maybe it was that weakness that made her unable to back out of going with him to the wedding. “All right,” she said.
His serious expression lifted and she saw relief in his gaze. “So that’s that. It’s a date.”
“Yes.”
She would have to be so careful to keep things in perspective for the next couple of weeks before Gemma’s wedding, she thought after he left her house to return next door to his children and his parents.
She was making a new start here, figuring out life on her own. That life didn’t include a long-distance relationship with a man whose world was thousands of miles away.
She and Ian couldn’t be together, no matter how she might feel herself falling for him.
She remembered his words with a little thrill.
You must know I’m becoming quite ridiculously infatuated with you.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if circumstances were different and they could both act on these feelings growing between them? But they weren’t and they couldn’t. They might share a mutual infatuation but it could never move beyond that.
Something told her that if she gave her heart to Ian Summerhill, it would be damaged forever.
IAN WALKED BACK to his rented house, his thoughts whirling and his face hot with mortification.
Good Lord. He really was an idiot. Had he really blurted out that he was infatuated with her?
What had he been thinking?
The answer to that was quite simple. He hadn’t been thinking at all. The words had slipped out without a moment’s thought behind them.
He was hopeless. Utterly hopeless. Put a beautiful woman in his arms and he completely lost his head.
He should never have kissed her. He still didn’t know what had come over him. That was twice now that he had acted without thinking and had simply taken what he wanted like some kind of Neanderthal. And that was probably being unfair to Neanderthals.
He had to be far more careful around her. He meant what he had told her earlier. He wasn’t looking for a relationship, even if one between him and a woman who lived five thousand miles away was even possible. The children needed him right now. It would be hard enough for them to pack up their lives and move at the end of the summer. They had already endured far too many life changes for children so young. He had vowed he wouldn’t date anyone until Thomas was at least through grade school, which right now seemed eons away.
The thunderstorm had blown over as quickly as it had arisen, leaving the air cool and the lake churning and restless—much as he felt inside.
He hurried through the wet grass, managing to wrestle most of his emotions under control by the time
