Page 18 of Be My Reason

We finish our eighteen holes without any more touching from Nate orclub-swinging assaults from me. I’m pretty quiet, just watching the Graham-Emma dynamic. They, on the other hand are touching about as much as two people can without someone telling them to get a room.

I catch Nate watching them as well.Actually he is more than watching. He is staring, studying them as Graham runs his hand up and down Emma’s arm. He blinks rapidly, shakes his head and looks over at me with a sad face. He looks at me appraisingly from head to toe, then closes his eyes and takes a deep breath while his hand rakes through his hair. When his eyes open and he looks at me, he smiles and then gestures over at the bar and says, “How about a beer to end the night?”

All things considered, this night has been almost completely benign.Nate has been practically a perfect gentleman and there haven’t been many awkward moments. In fact, I hesitate to say it was almost fun.

We sit and nurse our beers for another hour, falling into comfortable conversation.Graham and Emma are now openly holding hands and are clearly lusting after each other. Nate has been surprisingly nice tonight. He is a totally different person than he was yesterday. Now that I think of it, I haven’t even seen him ogle any woman here.

Back at the hotel, I say goodnight to Nate and Graham at the car.Nate holds his hand out for me to shake but pulls it back almost immediately and wrinkles his nose. “Sorry,” he mumbles.

“No, it’s okay.” I smile and offer him my hand. After all, he was a good boy, for the most part.

He gives me that smile again.I hadn’t seen it all night and it stirs something inside me. He takes my hand in his. I feel his calloused fingers against my soft skin as once again, sparks shoot up my arm from the point of contact.

I pull my hand away as he leans in close to my hair and whispers, “I feel it, too.” Then he turns and gets back into the car and I head upstairs alone.But not before I go into the hotel bar and order a Cosmo to take up with me.

~~ ~

As I run through the beautiful oak-tree-lined trails again, I can’t help but smile at the way Emma floated into my room last night. She kicked off her shoes, got on the bed with me and proceeded to tell me all about the panty-melting kiss Graham planted on her at the door to our suite. I felt like we were teenagers at a sleepover, because the way she was describing it was like a very first kiss. What surprises me is that she didn’t sleep with him and they stopped at a kiss. This is serious. Big-time serious.

I’m trying to figure out if I should be supportive or try to break them up so I won’t have to see Nate again when none other than the man himself appears by my side and is matching me stride-for-stride.I decide to keep on running and see what happens. Like yesterday, I slow down a fraction and then speed up a little and since he seems dead set on keeping pace next to me, I resolve just to keep my natural time and go with it. Every so often I glance over and see him smiling at me. I roll my eyes. That only makes him smile harder. Sometimes he speeds up, running out in front of me, and I think it is so that I can admire his ass. I’ll admit it’s a nice one and, because I’m right behind him and there really isn’t any other place to look, I’m pretty much forced to watch it.

He is keeping to my right which means I don’t get a good look at the tattoo on his right arm. I’ve never been one to find tattoos very sexy.I would never get one myself. But, on him, with that bulging bicep, it works. And God help me if I don’t want to run my fingers all the way around it.

Michael.I need to think about Michael. Michael doesn’t have a tattoo.Okay, not that. Something else about Michael. When we talked last night, I was reminded of all the wonderful qualities that make him perfect. It is not his fault that he can’t take trips like this with me. He is a doctor for goodness sake. We talked about our wedding and we even picked out a date for next spring, March nineteenth to be exact. I was supposed to go out looking for wedding dresses while I’m here but I just can’t find the time between running, studying and being Emma’s wingman. Michael told me that he stopped by the bakery yesterday only to find my mother already there helping out. I’m glad for that, he is stretched thin enough already.

Thinking about Michael, the bakery and my mother almost makes me forget who is running next to me.Maybe if it weren’t for the hairs standing up on my sweaty skin, Iwouldforget. He has not uttered a word this entire time.

Twenty minutes later we reach the entrance to the hotel and slow down to a stop.We both remove our ear buds and he says, “Thanks for the run.” Then he turns around and starts running in the other direction.

That has got to be the strangest half-hour of my life.

Chapter Six

Emma gets back a short time after I stop studying for the day. She tells me that Graham is treating us to The Raleigh Experience tonight—a night of must-do things starting with dinner at The Angus Barn. I guess that sounds okay with me. Last night was fine and if Nate behaves himself again tonight, there shouldn’t be any issues.

I flat iron my hair and wear it straight down my back.Then I put on a pair of white jeans with my cleaned-up wedges and top it off with my favorite blue and white off-the-shoulder sweater. If we’re going to the hip places, I might as well look the part.

The guys meet us in the lobby again and we have the same seating arrangements in Graham’s car which isn’t as weird tonight. I even let Nate hold the door for me. As long as he is being gentlemanly I should let him. It’s better than him being the ass he was that first night. But don’t think I didn’t catch his smirk as I got into the car through the door he was holding open.

We get to the restaurant and I laugh because it really does look like a barn and I wonder if we are going to have some kind of barbeque or something.However, once we are seated, it becomes quite clear to me that this is not just a run-of-the-mill barn restaurant. This is a nice place. High-end food, high-end drinks, great service. Basically all the things that I am not accustomed to.

Graham and Emma slide into a booth as she looks nervously behind her shoulder at me like I might take her head off.I roll my eyes at her. Sometimes I wonder if my mother was right and my eyes might actually get stuck at the top of their sockets if I roll them too much. I am so testing that theory this week.

I slide into the booth first and place my purse down next to me, giving me a buffer as Nate sits downby me. He eyes my placement of the purse as he grins and shakes his head.Yes, buddy, that’s right, no touching.

The conversation is light, just like last night and it really is getting easier to be around Nate without hating him so much.He is such a different person from that first night that it almost seems like heissomeone different, merely another friend of Graham’s along for the ride so that I’m not a third wheel. If it weren’t for that smell of fresh laundry and pure Nate that permeates even the smell of cooked meat, I would think it was someone else entirely.

We are halfway through dinner when an attractive and curvy woman stops suddenly as she walks by the table.Oh, here we go, enter Mr. Playboy. She has long blond curly hair, and I mean silky spiral curls from root to tip, the kind those of us with frizzy curls envy. She puts her hands on the table in front of Nate and leans over so that her cleavage is gloriously on display for him . . . and me.

She starts talking to him but is looking at me.If she could shoot daggers from her eyes, I would be shish-ka-bobbed to the booth behind me. “Hey, baby, I didn’t realize you were feeding them before fucking them these days,” she says with a hint of a French accent.

My eyes go wideand my chin falls to the table in front of me. Nate pales as his fists ball up under the table. Graham closes his eyes and shakes his head and Emma is about ready to jump out of the booth and grab Miss Curly-hair-boobs and rip her head off.

Nate quips back with hardly a hesitation, “Isn’t this a little far from the corner you are working, Claudia?”

Oh,God. Claudia. The ex-wife.

Nowthe color drains frommyface. I’m looking eye-to-eye with the woman who snagged the one that got away from me. She doesn’t look at all like I imagined her. Okay, so maybe I have been imagining what she looks like even though I know I shouldn’t care about it. I thought she would look angelic, like a wounded little girl who had been crushed when the love of her life wronged her. I realize that I was probably projecting what I looked like at seventeen onto the image of her. But, this I didn’t expect. She looks . . . well she looks like a total bitch. She is dressed like a slut and although she is very beautiful, she also seems kind of skanky.

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