“Okay, then,” he said quietly. “If you don’t want to pursue this—”
“I don’t want to pursue it,” she said emphatically, though her voice was shaking. She couldn’t seem to meet his gaze, which suggested she might be lying to him, maybe even to herself.
Still, Aidan wasn’t about to force the issue. Sometimes people just didn’t click. Given everything else in his life, devoting time to figuring out Liz was probably a lousy idea anyway.
He dared to touch her cheek again. “Liz, sweetheart, don’t look so miserable. No broken hearts here, okay? We’ll stick to being friends.”
Her eyes were surprisingly bright as she directed her gaze everywhere but toward him. He realized with a sense of shock that she was close to tears.
“Thanks for understanding,” she said, still not meeting his gaze as those tears tracked down her cheeks.
“Sure,” he said. But the truth was, he didn’t understand at all. And he had a hunch he wasn’t going to forget that kiss half as easily as he’d claimed.
11
Liz avoided Sally’s the morning after her dinner with Aidan, even though Sunday-morning breakfast there was her favorite. Sally made outstanding waffles with real Vermont maple syrup and served them with bacon that was perfectly crisped. There were usually a few other people there whom she knew, not as many as there might be on a weekday, but enough that she usually had company. The comfort of those waffles and her friends was probably what she needed most. What she didn’t need, though, was a chance encounter with Aidan after that ground-shaking kiss and the downhill evening that had followed.
Liz kept right on avoiding the café during the next week and the following weekend, even though Shanna, Bree and Heather had all called her on it. They clearly recognized there was something more behind this change in her routine than the flimsy excuses she kept offering. Liz, however, was determinedly not talking. Satisfying their curiosity was not her top priority. Getting her equilibrium back was.
She’d been doing just fine building a new life. The attraction to Aidan had been an unanticipated distraction from her goal of becoming the independent woman she wanted to be. And, no matter how hot those kisses had been, two people with secrets they were intent on keeping could hardly have any sort of future, not when trust and honesty had to be at the core of any relationship.
So, instead of the routine she’d come to love, she ate a bowl of cereal standing up at her kitchen counter, then took the dogs for a walk, hoping the exercise would wipe out the memory of that amazingly romantic moment on the deck at Brady’s with moonlight spilling over them. Unfortunately, it seemed it would take more than a daily walk to accomplish that. That kiss had been every bit as magical as Aidan had believed, no question about it.
Maybe, she thought with a hint of wry humor, it could be excised from her brain with some sort of Gamma Knife procedure. Until then, though, she had to keep moving and trying to dodge all the questions that kept coming her way from her friends.
On the second Sunday of her self-imposed exile, she was almost home when Archie started straining at his leash, then broke free and bounded toward the house. She understood why when she spotted Aidan sitting on the front porch. Her traitorous heart leaped with almost as much joy as Archie was expressing. She closed her eyes for an instant and prayed for guidance.
“Good morning,” Aidan said quietly, then held out a large take-out cup of coffee from Sally’s. “You weren’t at breakfast. It’s not the first time you’ve missed it. Since the absences started the day after we kissed, I’ve gotten the feeling you’re avoiding me.”
“Why would I do that?” she said, as if the thought had never crossed her mind. “I just changed up my routine. I like taking the dogs for a walk instead. They need the exercise before being cooped up in the house all day.”
Hoping to divert his attention from whatever his mission might be, she said, “By the way, isn’t school out this week?”
“Tuesday’s the last day,” he confirmed.
“Then you’ll be getting Archie on Wednesday,” she said flatly, not allowing any room for argument. “I’ll have all his things ready by eight, so you can pick him up.”
Aidan’s gaze locked on hers. “I didn’t come to discuss the arrangements for Archie.”
A flash of panic washed over her. She’d been hoping that he’d gotten the message, that the words she’d spoken that night at Brady’s and her subsequent actions had finally gotten through to him that she wasn’t interested. Or, to be more precise, wasn’t going to allow herself to act on any wayward interest she might feel.
If only they’d never shared that blasted kiss, she thought, remembering it in exquisite detail—the softness of his lips, the mingling of their breath, the heat that had tracked right through her bloodstream. Good thing she wasn’t like most men, she concluded wryly, since they thought with their hormones. A dynamite kiss was all it took to wipe reason straight out of their heads. Fortunately, she was less susceptible. Well, not to the kiss, but to the urge to follow up on it with more.
She accepted the coffee Aidan held out to her, but made herself frown at him. “I thought we weren’t going to pursue this, whatever this might be. Didn’t we decide that just the other night? I thought I’d made myself clear. Have you forgotten that conversation and your promise already?”
Aidan didn’t seem impressed by the reminder or the snippy tone in which she delivered it. “I brought coffee, Liz. Friends do that sort of thing, especially when they sense they might have upset a friend and that the friend might be deliberately avoiding them because of
