Page 32 of Fall for Me

But Seamus surprised me by speaking next. “Do you want to stay for dinner?”

I was so surprised by the way my stomach flipped that for a moment I didn’t say anything.

“Not…” he pressed his hand to the back of his neck once more. “Nothing else, Chelsea. Just food.”

“Right. Of course,” I said. Of course I didn’t have the same pull I used to, with men. I kept forgetting that. My scar seemed to burn on my face. Had I even wanted it to be something else? That wasn’t the way forward. I turned, stuffing my arms into my elbows and taking a few strides away toward the ridge.

“It’s not because of you, and… what you look like,” Seamus said behind me, fully reading my mind. “It’s just… Eli’s my best friend. He asked me to look out for you.”

A flicker of anger rushed through me. Just when I thought I’d gotten Eli to fucking trust me. I walked back to him. “Eli’s not in charge of my life,” I said. I knew I sounded like a petulant kid. I also sounded like I’d wanted him to ask me for dinner for some other reason besides being friendly. Embarrassment added to the heat in my face. Thank God he couldn’t see it.

“No, he’s not. But I don’t have a lot of friends, Chelsea. I’ve got some poker buddies, but we don’t exactly open up to each other. Eli’s the only one. And I’d rather not fuck that up.”

I almost said, yeah, well, I don’t have anyone. Not anymore. But in the moonlight, I could see the pain etched across Seamus’s face. He’d gone through some bad stuff. Right then, a memory hit me from when I was a kid. Seamus—or rather, the absence of Seamus. He stopped coming to our house for a while, and Eli was gone all the time with him. My parents and Cass were teary-eyed, and even Griff had seemed less quiet and more… somber. When I finally got up the courage to ask Mom, she had to explain to me that Seamus’s brother had died.

I felt my shoulders drop. Oh my God. I’d completely forgotten. And then his Mom…

A lump formed in my throat, so hard and fast, and I felt tears brimming.

I swallowed, looking away. I couldn’t cry, not now. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to contain my own grief; it would come spilling out, messy and raw, like a hurricane.

“I know what that’s like not having a lot of friends,” I said instead, looking away so he wouldn’t see the way I was blinking fast.

“Come on, I’ve seen you with friends?” He sounded skeptical. “Eli said…” He paused. “I just thought you were all about your friends.”

I swallowed down the last of the lump in my throat. It was a fair enough assumption, given my history. “You’d think. But did you know only one of them checked in with me while I was in the hospital?” I held my arms, rubbing them against the growing cold of the night.

It was embarrassing to admit that.

“It makes sense. Except for Mia, I never spent time with any of them on our own. We never talked about anything except where we were going out that night. Or which guy we wanted to take home.”

For whatever reason, I chose that moment to look in Seamus’s eyes, and the heat that hit me when I did rattled me. He might have been someone I’d taken home. The thought made me slightly ill now. Not because I wouldn’t want it—because God knew I’d noticed how he looked in that sweater—like he belonged on a moor in Ireland, the wind whipping at his hair.

God, Seamus wasn’t just attractive, he was gorgeous. He held so much behind those brooding dark eyes. Even now, knowing how bad it would be, I thought about how we were all alone up here. What would he look like pulling that sweater over his head? Undoing the button at the top of his shirt, and then the next? He’d be soft skin and firm muscle under there, I knew it. All the way down.

God, I’d been staring at him.

I looked away fast.

“Real deep, right? Maybe I should have tried talking about more with them. Maybe it’s on me.”

Seamus seemed to consider that for a moment. “It’s not easy telling people stuff. You never know what they’re going to do with it.”

He was right. He was exactly right. Those women I hung out with, I’d seen them scrunch up their noses when Mia or I talked about work. Boring!

I laughed then, a little bitterly. “I’m pretty sure half of those women only talk to me because they’re interested in my brothers, or because they think I can comp them drinks at the hotel.”

“Could you?”

There went that curl of his lip again, and the responding butterflies in my stomach.

“Sure,” I laughed. “But I never did. Listen, I may have been a mess in my personal life, but I never mixed business with pleasure. Or non-pleasure, I guess. I was always good at my job.”

“I know. It’s why Eli always said he wasn’t as worried about you as he could have been.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah. I mean, he didn’t like what you were doing. He was clear about that, but he trusted that you knew what you were doing.”

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