Page 45 of Branded
But this wasn’t the time for pressure.
Because the fire in her eyes had been tamped out. I’d gone too big, too fast, too Smitty. So, I shrugged. “Then the rest of it won’t, and we’ll just be friends, yeah?”
“I—” Her lips pressed flat, a frown deepening into lines surrounding her mouth. “Smitty, that’s not so simple?—”
A knock at the door.
Oliver stood there, his tablet in one hand.
He glanced from Kailey to me and his brows lifted. “I can come back…”
Maybe I should have hated my friend for the interruption, but frankly, it had come at the perfect moment.
Get her distracted, off the topic of what I knew was an inevitability in my heart, what I needed to convince her of, even if that convincing wasn’t going to happen at that moment.
This would buy me some additional time to get her there.
Or rather for me to regroup and find the right moment to circle back and reapproach.
Hopefully, with more finesse.
Or at least, with slightly less Smitty.
Oliver gestured down the hall. “I’ll just?—”
“No,” I said. “Don’t let me interrupt your meeting. I need to get on the ice anyway.”
Oliver’s eyes were on mine, warning and curiosity mixing in the pale blue depths. “Smitty.”
“See ya,” I muttered.
“Smitty,” Oliver hissed.
“Later.”
Then I was vapor?—
Or at least, a six-foot-something hockey player who was hauling ass down the hallway.
Same difference anyway.
Fourteen
Kailey
Oliver lifted a brow.
I felt my cheeks get hot, the tell-tale twisting beginning in my belly.
His face gentled as he moved forward, dropping into a chair, holding out his tablet so I could see the screen. “I was thinking…” he began.
And then he proceeded to throw a curveball at me that would require me to write a whole lot of code.
So basically, he pulled me right out of my head, and the swirling in my mind and gut and focused me on what calmed me—my work.
But it was only a temporary solution.
Because when I paused in my note-taking for what I’d do when he left me to my program and my code and the safety of the clarity of the coding language that ran my program and happened to look up at him, he was staring at me.
