Page 36 of Suddenly Single
Edan grabbed it just before she dropped it. She put the helmet on her head, her hands on her hips, and dipped into a model’s pose. “How do I look?”
Beautiful.“Ridiculous,” he said, and handed her the bag, then stepped forward to tighten the strap of her helmet.Jenny lifted her chin and smiled up at him, her gaze first locked on his eyes, then sliding down, to his mouth as he fumbled with the straps of her helmet.
His blood began to stir.“Donna smile so,” he grumbled.“It’s distracting.”
“Is it? Sorry, but smiling and yoga are my thing.You should try them sometime.You’d be amazed at how much happier you’d feel about life if you did either one.Double the feels if you do them simultaneously.”
He allowed himself to look in her eyes. “I couldna possibly smile at so many things as you.You’d smile at a rock, I think.” He cinched up the strap beneath her chin.
“Better to smile at a rock than to kick it.” She winked.And then blithely faded away from him and walked over to have a look at the ATV.
At nine o’clock, Jenny was staring at the door of the reception. Edan took a seat on the bench, happy to watch her bottom in the shorts as she wandered about.“I wonder where Lorenzo is?” she said idly, and sat down on the bench so close to Edan that her knee touched his.
Edan thought about moving his leg away.He didn’t. “Lorenzo is on Italian time,” he said.He stretched his arms out across the back of the bench.If Lorenzo never showed up, he wouldn’t mind.
Jenny leaned back and rested her neck against his arm.It was such a familiar thing to do, something a child or a spouse would do, and oddly, it made Edan feel lonesome. Audra had never been so easy with him.Bloody hell, was he going to be maudlin now, too?
He was beginning to wonder if he even knew himself anymore. He’d been perfectly fine before this girl had come in and banged away at his reception bell.He’d known exactly what he wanted and needed to do.But then she’d come and now he was questioning everything.
He looked away.
“I’ve had a wonderful few days here,” Jenny suddenly announced. “Do you ever wonder how you ended up in one place instead of another? Like…I ended up at Mount Holyoke because my dad knew someone who knew the dean and told me about it. Otherwise, I never would have heard of Mount Holyoke. If I hadn’t gone to school there, I never would have met my best friends.And then I ended up as an art teacher because I got involved with an anti-bullying group—”
“You were bullied?”
“Oh no. I was trying to help someone who had been bullied. Turns out, he was the bully, butanyway,I met this man in the group whose mother was on the board of a private school.What if I hadn’t tried to help that kid? I never would have been an art teacher.”
He was certain there was more to the story, because so far, it was illogical.
“It’s just strange how things have a way of working out.” She turned her head to look at him. “And then I started thinking about why I ended up here, and I think maybe because I needed to help someone.”
He felt a funny little curl in the pit of his stomach.Did he need help? Did he need someone to pull him out of the muck of his life? No, he was fine.He wasfine.“I donna need help,” he said.
Color crept into Jenny’s cheeks. “FYI, you’ve made that abundantly clear,” she said. “But I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about Lorenzo.” She looked away.“And I was talking aboutme.”
“Jenny Turner!” came the shout of a familiar voice.
“There he is!” Jenny said brightly, and hopped up off the bench and away from Edan as Lorenzo came striding outside.
Eleven
The ATV tour was nothing as promised in the brochure Jenny had found at Lakeshore Coffee in East Beach, and she was fairly certain it was Edan’s fault. They stopped twice; once at a very narrow valley filled with trees, and Jenny listened politely as Edan announced that the birds that lived there had gone north for the summer.Next, they stopped alongside a babbling brook and Edan said fox and deer probably drank here, but he couldn’t know for certain.And then he promptly returned to his ATV and took off, leaving Jenny and Lorenzo scrambling to catch up.
When they reached the lake—which was more of a giant pond, really—Edan took the tackle and three poles from the cage on his ATV and walked down to the water’s edge without a word.
“Don’t you want your liverwurst?” Jenny shouted after him, holding up the sandwich bag.
Edan said something in response over his shoulder, and it didn’t sound very appreciative.Jenny sighed, fished a sandwich from the bag, and dropped the bag.
She should never have kissed that stupid, stubborn, ridiculous man.He’d gone entirely weird since she had.
“Jenny Turner, look, see what I have,” Lorenzo said anxiously, holding out his phone. “Elizabetta had responded.”
“Has she?” Jenny asked absently.She was still watching Edan walk down to the lake’s edge.He had on knee-high rubber boots, faded jeans, and a fitted black tee.He looked rugged and sexy and competent, the kind of guide you’d hope to get on some Alaska excursion into the wild in case there were bears to be wrestled or elk to be caught.He was also so damn stoic she wanted to punch him right in the kisser.
Lorenzo followed her gaze out to Edan.“Don’t worry for him,bella.He likes to be alone.”
“No one likes to be alonethatmuch.”
