Page 29 of Love in Tune

‘I don’t need to calm down,’ Honey lied.

‘The hell you don’t. You’re giving me a headache with all your nervousness, and trust me, you won’t like me when I have a headache.’

‘I don’t like you very much as it is,’ she said, clinging to the safe ground offered by throwing mild insults.

‘Just pour the damn wine, will you?’

Honey deliberated between the lure of a glass of wine or staying sober, because although she did in fact need to calm the fuck down, she feared it might loosen her tongue and her hands in a way that would send him back into hiding again for weeks on end. In the end, her nerves won out and she unscrewed the wine again and poured them both a drink.

‘There,’ she said with bad grace, shoving the glass towards him until it bumped his knuckles. He picked up the glass and tasted the wine, and his lips twisted into an almost favourable expression.

‘Not bad, Honeysuckle. Not bad at all.’

She raised her own glass, sipped, and found herself glad to have paid more than she usually would for wine. It was delicious, and dangerously smooth as it slid down her throat.

‘Better?’ Hal asked, almost as if he were watching her, which of course he couldn’t have been. It was just that he seemed to know what was going on under her skin, to hear the quickened beat of her heart, the loud dash of her blood around her veins, the bloom of heat over the skin on her throat.

‘Mmm,’ she said noncommittally, unsure if she felt better or worse for the wine. ‘So, what do I do next?’

Hal instructed her through the remaining couple of steps, his fingers lingering on the base of his wine glass as if he thought she might try to take it from him. As it was, she wasn’t thinking any such thoughts. She was more pre-occupied with not burning the bolognese because she was admiring his strong, sexy hands.

‘And now you turn it down to a simmer, and we wait.’

‘Really? How long for? What’ll we do in the meantime?’

He shrugged. ‘Well, I’m not so great at cards these days, and hide and seek might take a while.’ He drank the last of the wine from his glass. ‘So I guess you should refill my glass and we’ll do that other thing you’re so good at.’

Was he talking about their kiss? Honey couldn’t help but preen at the fact he’d said she was good at it, but they probably needed to clear the air about it.

‘Look, I’m sorry I kissed you the other night.’ In truth, it was hard to be all that sorry about something so knee-tremblingly good, but she didn’t want it to make their fragile friendship awkward. ‘It was completely my fault. I promise not to do it again. I won’t even mention it, if you like.’

Hal smirked. ‘Talking, Honey. I was referring to talking. You’ve been banging on my door for days asking to talk to me, so here I am. Now talk.’

Panic set in as she finished off the last of the wine between their two glasses.

‘I was just trying to be neighbourly. Friendly. I thought we’d become friends.’

‘Did you? Do you kiss all of your friends like that?’

‘We just agreed never to talk about that again.’

‘Did we? Only I think you said it and I didn’t answer. Not that I want to talk about it, because you were spot on when you said it wasn’t going to happen again.’

‘For the record, seeing as you didn’t say we were never going to talk about it, no, I don’t kiss all of my friends like that, Hal. I’ve never kissed anyone else like that in my life. Or rather, no one else has ever kissed me like that before in my life.’

Hal put his glass against his lips and let it linger there, and then set it down slowly. ‘Well, maybe this Robin guy will. You better go easy on the garlic on Friday, just in case.’

‘Noted. Thank you,’ she said, stirring the bolognese for something to do. ‘I doubt it though. He still lives with his mother and the best thing Nell could think of to say about him was that he had good hair.’

Honey ran her eyes over Hal’s rumpled dark hair, which was probably longer than he usually wore it and all the sexier for it. It constantly looked as if he’d been pushing his hands through it, and it made Honey want to push hers through it too. She picked up her wine glass to give her fingers something else to do.

‘Will your special knickers get another outing on Friday?’

Was he flirting? It was difficult to tell with Hal, because sarcasm was his modus operandi.

‘I might wear my Saturday pants, just to confuse him,’ she shot back, and then realised that she’d basically just said she was planning to show Robin her knickers, which she categorically wasn’t.

‘Lucky Robin,’ Hal murmured, raising his glass to his lips. ‘My bolognese and your Saturday pants. The man’s in for a treat.’

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