Page 6 of Dangerous Secrets

To her surprise, Mr. Ames—Nick—took her elbow, as if she could have problems navigating the broad, even sidewalk stretching out before her or needed guidance in the small town she’d grown up in. Still, it was really nice. Men rarely took one’s elbow any more.

Uncle Franklin often took her arm when she accompanied him somewhere, but it was for balance. Nick Ames certainly didn’t need to hold her arm for balance.

Up close, he seemed even taller. The top of her head barely reached his shoulder, even with heels. He seemed broader, too, the shoulders incredibly wide beneath the rich, dark blue overcoat with the hand-stitches. Cashmere. Uncle Franklin had one just like it.

For a fraction of a second, Charity wondered what she was doing—going out for dinner with a man she didn’t know.

She’d surprised herself. He’d asked and she knew she should say no to dinner, perhaps yes to a drink in town, and then . . . her mouth opened andyesjust plopped out.

Of course, the fact that he was handsome as sin and had a killer smile might have something to do with it.

Manners, too. He’d positioned himself on the outside, next to the curb. It had been years since she’d seen a man deliberately place himself between a woman and the street. The last man besides Uncle Franklin that she’d seen doing that had been her father, always instinctively courteous with her mother. That had been over fifteen years ago, when they were still alive.

She and Nick walked down the block and he turned her right, onto Sparrow Road, with a gentle nudge of his hand. Halfway down the block, he stopped right outside a big black luxurious car. A Lexus, she thought, though she wasn’t sure. The only thing she was sure of was that it probably cost the equivalent of a year’s salary of a librarian.

He walked her around to the passenger door, unlocking it with the key fob, and handed her into the passenger seat as if she were the Queen of Parker’s Ridge.

A second later he was in the driver’s seat and helping her pull the seat belt over and down. To her astonishment, once the latch clicked, he didn’t pull back but leaned forward and planted a soft kiss on her mouth.

Charity stared at him. “What?—”

He’d already put the big car in gear. He looked over at her and grinned, teeth white in the darkness of the car, as he slowly pulled out of the parking space. “I figure we’re going to spend the entire evening wondering whether we’ll have a goodnight kiss, so I thought I’d just cut right through that. We’ve already kissed, so we’re not going to obsess about it. It’s already done.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “I wasn’t going to obsess about a kiss.”

That was a lie. She’d been obsessing about it since she’d accepted the dinner invitation. If she was perfectly honest with herself, which she usually was, she’d been obsessing about kissing him since she’d laid eyes on him this morning.

He was right, though.

It had only been a chaste little kiss—a buss, it would have been called a century ago. But it had definitely broken the tension. They’d kissed. They could now have an easy-going dinner together.

Smart man, she thought. No wonder he’d become rich.

He drove sedately out of town. Too sedately, actually. To her surprise, he kept to the speed limit even outside the city limits. For some reason, some feather-brained bureaucrat somewhere had declared a speed limit of 35 miles an hour within a ten-mile radius of town. No one in town was crazy enough to respect the speed limit, except Mr. Nick Ames. He was driving the powerful car as if he were carrying a car load of eggs over bumpy terrain.

He braked to a complete stop at the intersection between Somerset and 5th, where on a clear day you could see into Canada.No onestopped at that intersection unless a car was coming, which you could see from miles out in every direction. Parker’s Ridgers simply slowed down a tad, but never stopped.

Nick Ames stopped while the light was yellow and waited patiently for it to cycle through yellow, red, then green.

It was nice being in a car with a careful driver, but Charity found herself pressing her right foot to the floor, wishing he’d do it too, silently urging him to go just a little bit faster. There was a thin line between safe driving and poky driving and he crossed it several times. Poky driving in Parker’s Ridge, where you had to work really hard to get into a fender bender, was overkill.

Getting to Da Emilio’s wasn’t easy. There were several turnoffs and very little signage. The locals got there easily enough, but it was hard for out of towners. Nick Ames didn’t seem to have any problems, though. He drove straight there.

The parking space outside the restaurant was nearly empty. It would fill up later, but for now the only patrons were those here for a pre-dinner drink. He drove into the first empty slot and killed the engine.

She smiled at him as he turned into the parking lot. “You have either a good sense of direction, an excellent memory or both.”

He turned to her, big hand draped over the steering wheel. “Both, actually. I think they’re the same part of the brain. I also have a really good memory for faces. I don’t often get lost.” He looked down at her bare hands. “You might want to put your gloves back on, it’s really cold outside.”

“Yes, mom,” Charity said with a roll of her eyes, but it was wasted. He’d already rounded the car and was opening her door, helping her out.

The little kiss had somehow changed the chemistry of the evening. From being a nice thank you gesture, the invitation to dinner had turned into a real date. Sex was in the air—pleasantly so. Nothing overdone, just little sparks flying about in the crystal-clear air.

Charity drew in a long, delighted breath. The air was pristine, smelling of a hundred miles of pine trees and the delights wafting from the air vents of Emilio’s kitchen. The smell of a wonderful evening.

Her life lately had been a little gray. Not gray, really, just a little . . . unchanging. Routine. She didn’t like to admit to herself just how much of her time and energy were taken up with Aunt Vera and Uncle Franklin. By the time Friday rolled around, after she’d put in 5 full days’ work at the library, checking in on her aunt and uncle two, three times a week, doing whatever was necessary for their comfort and safety, she only had enough energy to do household chores over the weekend.

Slowly, without noticing it, she started going out less and less, going to fewer movies and concerts. The one thing she made an exception for was Vassily. When he called, she always had the time and the energy.

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