She crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “You flew all the way over here to stare at me?”
He shook his head, but his gaze didn’t leave hers. “I came for you.”
Her heart did that little happy dance, but she pushed it away. She didn’t want this, didn’t want to deal with the hurt again. She thought she could, thought she could be patient while he worked himself out, but she realized that she might not be cut out to have a SEAL as a lover.
“No.”
He frowned.
“No?”
Poor pitiful SEAL.
“Yeah, I said no. Just because you put on a uniform and march into my brother’s restaurant doesn’t mean I’m going to forget everything.”
He glanced around at their audience. “Shouldn’t we talk about this in private?”
“You picked the setting.”
“You tell him, sistah,” someone yelled out.
He grimaced. “I thought we would go for a walk.”
Oh, he looked miserable. Just so miserable. He might love her, but flying across the Pacific didn’t really prove it. She wanted more, she wanted it all. And the only way she could get it was if she knew that he was in it for the long haul, like she was.
“Thinking’s overrated.”
A few more of the customers started catcalling, and his face started to turn pink. Oh, my. He wasembarrassed. And there was a tiny, evil part of her that was happy he was.
“I wanted to talk to you about our future.”
“We don’t have one.”
Up until that moment, he had been what she would call docile—for a SEAL. Now his eyes turned hard, his jaw flexed. She had to fight the urge to step back away from him. She had never been scared of him, but at the moment, she could easily see his anger.
“Don’t say that.”
Even though she could tell he was angry, she could hear a thread of desperation in his voice. It pricked at the already melting ice that encased her heart.
“You’re the one who ran away.”
He sighed. “I was stupid.”
She wanted to punish him, but since he admitted he was stupid, she would at least be cordial. “From the uniform, I assume you’re going to stay in the military?”
He nodded.
“So you flew over, and that must have been expensive by the way, dressed up in your little white uniform, to tell me you’re staying in the military.”
“I came for you.”
The declaration had a few of the women sighing, and if she were honest with herself, Shannon’s heart did a little flip flop.
“Me? Oh, the person who was trying to fix you?”
His jaw flexed again. “You were right, I was scared. Mainly because my mortality had been in question.”
“We’re all mortal.”