Page 134 of In Your Dreams, Holden Rhodes

As if he could sense my frustration with myself, his heavy arm came around my shoulder, anchoring me.

“It’ll be okay,” he murmured in my ear. “Give it time.” He pressed a kiss to my temple and I leaned into his chest.

Being with Holden was so easy. Every day, I forgot another reason why we shouldn’t. The friends with benefits thing was far in the distance and I didn’t have a clue what we were now.

I avoided bringing it up, in case we uncovered something that would undo it all. I wasn’t ready for everything to come undone.

“Did the arborist find anything?” I asked him.

He shook his head, eyes on me with an unreadable expression. “You’re not going back to the inn, though. I like you staying at my place.”

My heart thrummed with pleasure. This was terrible, and I knew this was terrible, that I enjoyed this pushy, protective side of him. I thinned my lips to hide a smile.

“Fine,” I said, as if it didn’t thrill me. I hid my grin.

His phone buzzed and he read who was calling before turning to me. “I need to take this. Be right back.” He pressed a quick kiss on my cheek before striding off with his phone to his ear.

I stared after him with narrowed eyes. Discomfort swooped and dipped in my stomach.

Holden had been acting weird in the past two weeks. Not bad weird, just… different. He took phone calls in the other room. The owner of the hardware store was chatting with him at the bar and abruptly ended the conversation when I stopped by, like they’d been talking about me. When I asked how Holden’s day was or what he had done that day, sometimes his answers were vague or he changed the subject.

He was keeping something from me.

I sat on a log at the beach and watched him talk on the phone. He said something before listening and nodding. His gaze moved to me and he smiled and winked at me.

My stomach pinched. It was happening again.

He’s not Grant, I reminded myself. I never knew Grant’s family. I never connected with Grant like I did with Holden. Holden had opened up his entire life to me, not the other way around. He cared about me. What did I have that he wanted? Nothing.

Holden loved me. He hadn’t said but I knew he did. It was in every glance, and every brush of his fingers over my skin.

Grant never loved me. None of those other guys did.

It was fine. It was just a few phone calls.

But why didn’t he want me to overhear? I thought about a book I had read shortly after the whole Grant thing happened, about fear instincts. It said we had been through millions of normal interactions, and our guts always knew when something wasn’t right.

Holden walking away while he was on the phone was weird.

My stomach tensed. I leaned my chin on my palm while I waited, watching him.

When he hung up, he walked toward me, hands in his jacket pockets and watching me with a warm gaze, and my shoulders eased as I admired him. A gust of wind blew his hair back and I held back a sigh of admiration.

He was so goddamned handsome.

“Let’s get lunch,” he suggested, holding his hand out.

I stood and brushed the sand off my jacket from the log.

It was nothing, I told myself. Holden couldn’t be more different from Grant.

We headed to the town’s main street and strolled past the shops on our way to the sushi restaurant. Holden’s hand wrapped around mine, keeping me warm during the chilly day. We passed a jewelry store and he stopped.

His gaze traveled over the rings in the window. He glanced at me and tilted his head to the store. “Let’s go inside.”

Something in the window caught my eye and my stomach dropped.

It was my ring. Or, my old ring. My actual old ring was probably still sitting in that pawn shop back in Toronto, but it was the same design, with gold instead of silver.

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