“Exactly.”
“Why do you want to leave?”
A sigh escaped. “Family trouble. Plus…” I swallowed hard.Guess we’re talking about this whether I want to or not.“Plus someone from my past showed up in town unexpectedly, and he’s not a man I want to be around.”
“An ex?”
I nearly choked again. “No! I mean, not an ex, just someone who hurt me as a child.”
For once, Garrett’s cool facade cracked, and he actually looked a tiny bit scary as he put two and two together and made entirely the wrong number.
“He hurt you? Touched you?”
“No, he didn’t touch me, not like that. Please, can we drop this?” My appetite deserted me, and the fork dropped from my hand and clattered to the plate. “I can’t… I just can’t.”
The tension dropped out of Garrett’s shoulders, but I could tell the sudden relaxation was forced. Mind over matter. The lines on his forehead were the last thing to disappear as he reached carefully past the candles and twined his fingers through mine.
“Then don’t. Why don’t we focus on the positive? What’s keeping you in Oregon?”
An easier question.
“Friends. I don’t have many of those, and I’ve always found it difficult to, you know, form any kind of relationship. The thought of starting again overseas… I’m in a rock-hard-place situation.”
“Overseas?”
“I have one friend in Poland. He moved there a while ago, and he’s offered me a place to stay until I find my feet.”
“He?”
Garrett had called Hadley out on her jealousy, but I thought I saw a tiny flash of fire in his sapphire eyes. Or maybe it was just the reflection from the candles?
“My old dance partner. Relax, he’s gay.”
“Do you even speak Polish?”
“I downloaded an app this week.”
“It gets damn cold there in the winter.”
“You’ve been?”
A brief hesitation, then a nod. “For work.”
Did he mean his old military job or his current one? I didn’t get a chance to ask before a girl my age approached the table with a tray full of roses, individually wrapped in cellophane and tied with ribbon. She addressed Garrett.
“Hi, can I interest you in buying a rose for your wife? We’re raising money for Live without Limits.”
“Oh, we’re not married,” I said.
“Yet,” Garrett added, and my gaze snapped to his so fast I gave myself whiplash. He was joking. He had to be joking, but his expression was unreadable.
The rose seller didn’t seem to pick up on any tension. “Well, you make a lovely couple.” She not-so-subtly inched the tray forward. “All the proceeds go to a great cause.”
“Sure, give me a rose. A red one.”
“They’re five bucks each.”
He pulled a hundred bucks out of his wallet. “Keep the change.”