“It won’t be easier to just have me get it and some clothes?”
“By the time you decide what to wear, what you want to take versus leave, what makeup you want and so on?” His mouth curled at the gentle truth. “To be blunt? No. It won’t be more sensible let alone easier.”
“Fine.” She dug out her key and handed it over. “And then what?”
He smiled. “Before anything? A promise.”
Her brow furrowed. “What kind of promise?”
“An easy one.” He retrieved his own phone and made a point of showing her he was turning off the ringer. “No work this weekend. No taking calls, sneaking to read texts in the bathroom, et cetera. If we’re going, we’re going all out.”
“I won’t if you won’t. Deal?”
He saluted her with his phone before depositing it in his pants pocket. “Deal. Let’s get to the airport. We’re on the front side of rush hour, but it’ll still be a solid hour to get there. We can be in the airby nine thirty and in Dublin in time for a late dinner. We’ll shop for weather-appropriate clothes first thing tomorrow morning.”
She laughed out loud, the look of joy on her face absolutely priceless. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
“Neither can I.”
“Then whyareyou doing it?”
Gathering his pants and buttonless shirt, he dressed so much as he was able and left the room without answering her, because the truth was something he couldn’t quite put into words, and to lie to her would mean setting a precedent that had historically proven all too easy to fall into where women were concerned. So he said nothing. That didn’t stop the truth from ringing through his head, though. Why was he doing this?
Because I want to.
CHAPTER NINE
RACHELLOVEDTHEsmell of Irish wool. Silly, she knew, but there was something different about it, like it held the warmth inherent to the few Irish natives she had met in the single hour she’d been in Dublin.
Isaac had been efficient, arranging for their flight and a car and driver to meet them at the private strip at Dublin’s international airport. They’d been whisked away to a shop where Isaac was now outfitting her against the damp chill of the Irish fall. Outside, rain fell in a singular sheet that created a steady percussion, the sound creating white noise that threatened to lull her to sleep where she stood. The shop was warm and she’d been plied with tea and biscuits as she settled in to try on the growing mountain of clothes her lover seemed to think she needed, but all she wanted to do was sleep. And see the city. And go back to bed with the man who’d brought her to this amazing place.
This whole trip seemed surreal—an out-of-body experience her logical mind couldn’t make fit. Couldn’t rationalize. The experience was one she didn’t want to make sense of, though. It was simply too incredible to let reality seep in, because reality would ruin everything.
The first thing it would dismantle would be the man at her side. She was enamored with him, more so than she had ever deemed possible and certainly more than she cared to admit. This—this...thingbetween them was supposed to have been her one-night, take-her-life-back stand, and it was fast developing into something more. Something she was afraid to put a name to, afraid to speak out loud, as if acknowledging it would somehow make it all disappear like a curl of smoke in the wind. Likewise, she was terrified that if she tried to hold on to it, this new and fragile and wild thing would slip through her fingers. So what was she to do?
“Did you find an emergency exit and bolt?” Isaac asked, his tone infused with a sense of humor she had only caught a glimpse of since they’d met.
The last time had been on the flight, right after the pilot advised them to buckle their seat belts as they prepared to land. She’d lost all sense of cool and scrambled to the window with childlike enthusiasm. It was, after all, Ireland—her first glimpse of the Emerald Isle up close. She’d waited a lifetime for that particular moment. Isaac had impulsively tugged her hair and told her to sit down so they could land. She had huffed in impatience and flopped into her seat, and that was when she’d seen it—that glimpse of a genuine smile that lit his face from within. As desirable as anything, or anyone, she had ever seen in her life.
That was also when she had experienced that first real awareness, when like called to like, and she saw him not as a momentary lover but as someone who could be more if he cared to be. The realization had scared her silent, the awareness acting as an anchor that weighed her sharp retort so it fell off her tongue, down her throat and into the rising abyss of remorse leftby her ex-husband.
She had been grateful Isaac hadn’t pushed her as they landed, hadn’t tried to get her to own what was bothering her. Instead, he’d left her alone. Almost too much so. That he was warming to her again made her relax. Breathe easier.
“Rachel?” he called again. “Come out and show me your outfit or I’m coming in there.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” she replied, more in control of herself than she’d been even seconds before. “That would cause a scandal in such a conservative country, and the last thing you want is your name in the paper.”
“I couldn’t care less,” he answered, closer this time. “You have ten seconds to come out, or I swear to you I’m coming in.”
“Would serve you right,” she mumbled, tugging at the sweater’s hem and adjusting the fit so the garment hung evenly just below her natural waist. The jeans he’d picked out for her fit like a glove, but she still needed comfortable walking shoes, a couple pairs of underwear, basic toiletries—all the things to get her through a weekend in Dublin. “Dublin,” she mused aloud.
The dressing-room curtain was yanked aside, metal rings clattering against the curtain rod, and there he stood. A smile toyed at the corners of his mouth. “If you don’t make a decision, all you’re going to see of Dublin will be the inside of this dressing room.”
“It’s a lovely dressing room,” she replied.
He pinched her ass.
She yelped.