Garret pulled Kay’s chair out for her and waited for her to sit, feeling as though he were playing an intense game of chicken.
Would she cave and sit?
Or would he be relegated to the reject table?
Heather was on Kay’s other side. “Sit, please, everyone.” Kay, next to him, released a barely audible sigh, but did sit.
Heather glanced back at him and winked.
Garret plunked down into his chair, lest Kay change her mind about relegating him to the rejects.
“Did you like the journal?” he asked, not wanting to remind her of their disastrous first date any more than necessary, but also more than a little desperate to see if he’d picked correctly.
Her expression gentled, and he sent up a prayer that he might have actually chosen something right to say for a change.
“Yes, I did,” she said. “It was absolutely lovely.”
He shrugged. “The least I could do.”
She dropped her chin to her chest, sighed, and Garret’s stomach clenched. Shit. What had he done now?
And, fuck it all, but why did he care so much?
“Can we just start over?” she asked.
If he’d been hit over the head with a two-by-four, Garret wouldn’t have been more shocked. “Do you . . . do you want to?”
She glanced up at him from beneath her lashes, smiled shyly. “Yes.”
His heart skipped a beat, and he realized he was in the best type of trouble. The kind that led to monogamy and picket fences and, yes, it was way too fucking soon to even be considering that in the slightest . . . but—
There was something different about this woman.
Something he knew he wanted to explore further.
“Okay.”
Her smile widened. “Okay.”
The servers were coming around with salads and so Garret waited for their plates to be delivered. “Why writing?” he asked once the waiter had retreated.
Kay bit her lip again and that little flash of white against pink, the glistening of soft skin from the moisture left behind, the desire for it to be his teeth all contributed to making his cock twitch.
He hadn’t touched her, and he was at risk of embarrassing himself.
“I was super shy as a kid,” she said and shrugged. “Stories gave me a way to get all my words out and onto a page without worrying if I was going to stutter or screw up or miss something.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a tiny notebook, along with a pencil and an eraser shaped like a fox. “My weapons!” she joked. “The best part was that this one”—she made the little fox run across the tablecloth—“has magical erasing powers.”
“A marvelous feat of engineering.”
She smiled up at him. “Exactly.” Then shyness seemed to take over because her gaze drifted down. She seemed to realize her plate was still full and took a bite of salad.
He did the same.
“So,” she said a few moments later, “why rugby?”
Garret shrugged. “I loved watching it growing up. My dad’s Australian, and it’s obviously much more popular there. When my parents split up, I’d go there and visit my dad, and I sort of fell into it.”
One half of her mouth turned up. “Fell into it so well you were good enough to play professionally.”