When Graham’s eyes slid — with excruciating slowness — back up to mine, I sucked in a breath at the banked heat in their depths. So much heat, there was not one single trace of the ice I usually saw there.
Um.
What?
He’d never looked at me like that before. It rattled me. Which, I figured, was precisely his intention. A new tactic in our never-ending war of attrition. He was trying to throw me off balance and, damn it to hell, it was working. Digging my fingernails into my palms, I swallowed hard and summoned icy composure.
“Fine. Stand there, I can’t stop you. Peruse the crystals. I recommend the citrine, if you’re in the market.” My voice dropped to a low mutter he couldn’t hear. “Shove it up your ass for maximum potency.”
I turned my back on him, directing my attention at the open box of amethyst I’d been restocking before my morning went completely off the rails. This was a mistake, I learned half a heartbeat later. Because as soon as I looked away from him, Graham used the opportunity to close the distance between us, walking right around the display case to my side — as in, thestaff-onlyside — and leaning a hip against it. His forearm came down to rest on the countertop. His strong fingers splayed out on the glass surface.
I blinked down at them.
His hands, I couldn’t help but notice, were large, the skin bronze from time spent outdoors and, I’d bet my last dollar, rough from use. I didn’t know what Graham did in his spare time — I did notwantto know, the less I knew the better, so far as I was concerned — but it wasn’t hard to imagine him chopping logs or stacking firewood or repelling down cliffs. He was the outdoorsy type. He probably took his girlfriends camping. Real camping, as in sleep-on-a-bed-of-rock, build-your-own-fire, wipe-your-ass-with-wet-leaves camping. Notmyversion of camping, which only happened in a luxurious platformed yurt with WiFi access, a nearby hot spring, and a full menu of spa treatments. (Better known asglamping. Flo and I had spent a weekend doing exactly that at a retreat in the Berkshire Mountains last spring and it was, no-holds-barred, the most blissful weekend of my life.)
Graham’s hands didn’t look like he glamped. Graham’s hands looked like… I forced myself to stop looking at Graham’s hands before I started picturing them doing other insane things unrelated to the great outdoors. My eyes shifted to the denim-clad thigh he had pressed up against my display case. I stared at it for a long beat before I managed to force my eyes upward.
He was watching me, his eyes alert, and, it must be said, their startling green shade was even more of a sucker-punch from this proximity.
“Um,” I said, rattled by the fact that he was standing on my side of the counter, with only the box at our feet to separate us. “You can’t be over here.”
He said not a word.
“Seriously. Staff only.”
Still nothing.
“You’re smudging up my counter,” I said, trying a new tactic.
His eyes flickered down to his hand, splayed across my glass, for a brief second before returning to mine. Otherwise, there was no movement.
“It’s already totally smudgy from that guy. I’m going to be Windexing until I’m ninety.”
A low sound of exasperation rattled in his chest as he pushed off my counter, straightened to full height, and crossed his arms over his chest. “We need to talk.”
I blinked. “Pardon?”
“Talk. You. Me.” He glanced over his shoulder at the front section of the shop, where several customers were still milling around the shelves, pretending to read book descriptions while, in actuality, straining to eavesdrop on every word of our conversation. “Not here.”
“We don’t have anything to talk about.”
“Wrong.”
“Look, if you want a thank you so bad, I’ll say it! If that’s what it takes to make you leave.”
“Come to think of it, you might want to hold off on the gratitude. Doubt you’ll be thanking me after you learn why I’m here, Glinda.”
“Gwendolyn.”
“Sure.”
“What does that mean, I won’t be thanking you?” I asked, belatedly processing his odd statement.
“Told you already, we’ll talk about this somewhere private.”
“You know what? Forget it. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t care why you’re here. I don’t want to know.”
“May not want to, but you need to all the same.”