Page 68 of Your Place or Mine

I let him retreat.

For now.

Because I’d seen it.

Felt it.

Whatever was between us?

It wasn’t going away.

And soon, very soon, one of us was going to break.

I just hoped I was ready when it happened.

Chapter Seventeen

Callum

I lasted ten minutes behind the bar before I gave up pretending I wasn’t losing my damn mind.

Ten minutes of pretending to organize bottle caps. Ten minutes of trying to listen to two guys argue over the local baseball team’s new players. Ten minutes ofnotstaring down the bar where she’d been sitting, laughing, leaning in, throwing around that voice that curled around my neck like smoke.

I muttered something to Travis about going to check the back inventory and pushed through the swinging door with a little more force than necessary.

The storage room was dim and quiet and smelled like cardboard and hops, but it wasnotlike Lydia.

I braced both hands on the edge of the prep table, lowered my head, and let out a breath that came from somewhere deep in my gut.

What the hell was happening to me?

I’d been attracted to women before. I wasn’t a monk. I wasn’t blind.

But this wasn’t just an attraction.

This was an obsession of the slow, unbearable variety. The kind where I couldn’t stop thinking about how her lips curled when she was trying not to laugh, or how she said my name like it was equal parts challenge and promise.

Lydia.

Even her name sounded like something I could get addicted to.

I straightened and paced the room's length, trying to get a grip.

She’d walked in here tonight like it was no big deal—just dinner at a bar. Like she didn’t know she’d be sitting ten feet away from the man she’d been locking horns with since day one. And maybe shedidn’tcome for me. Maybe she really was just hungry. Hell, maybe she came for Drew.

My stomach twisted at that.

I didn’t want to admit it, but watching him laugh with her, lean in close, lookingtoo comfortable in her orbit…got to me.

More than it should have.

Drew was a flirt. Always had been. But something about the idea of him getting under her skin the way I already had made my hands curl into fists.

I leaned against the wall, palms flat, and dropped my head back with a thud. The drywall thumped behind me, dust drifting down like even the damn building was judging me.

I couldn’t afford this.

Not now. Not ever.

---