Page 73 of Hearts on the Table
“I was joking, sit! Sit.” I waited until she settled back on the stool. Her fingers rolled a coaster back and forth across the table as she glanced around us. We’d collected a few stares when she’d come in, but everyone had lost interest, going back to their drinks.
“So, we’re good? Because I want us to be good. I want this, Sam.”
“We’re good, Honey.” We sat in silence for a moment longer. Blake had just made his way to the front of the long line at the bar. The waitress was maybe lost forever. A thought occurred. “How’d you know I’d be here?”
“Hmm?”
“You came in here like you were looking for me. How’d you know I was here?”
“Ah.” She scraped an old sticker off the table with her thumbnail. “I, uh, looked at your location. From your phone. You shared it with me, remember?”
“You looked at my location.” It was probably stupid how happy that made me, but I’d spent the last few days worrying about how she felt about me and now she was right here apologizing and tracking my phone. I’d take it.
“I actually…kind of…look at your location a lot.” More scraping. I bit my cheek to hide the grin that wanted to take over my face.
“Stalker?”
“It might be a problem.” She looked at me, so seriously, so shamelessly, a laugh cracked out of me before I could wrangle it back down.
“Lainey.” I leaned in close, catching a whiff of her clean vanilla scent for the first time in days. “I know your weekly schedule by heart.”
“So, you’re not going to call the cops on me? If we both stalk each other, it cancels out?” Her lips were pink, bitten, like she’d been chewing on them all day. I wanted to lick them.
“Something like that.”
“I thought we weren’t getting touchy-feely in public?” Blake set three beers down. I stepped away from her. I hadn’t realized how close we’d gotten. Dangerous, tempting girl.
We managed to keep ourselves at a respectable distance, but Blake smirked every time Lainey or I brushed against the other, which we made excuses to do more often than was natural. She beat me back to my place from the bar and was pulling me out of the car before the garage door had even closed behind me.
Chapter 27
Lainey
Being banned from the OR was torture. For the next week, I was plagued by back-to-back Zoom interviews with various media personalities. Any time I thought the meetings were drying up, my mother’s team hit me with another wave of calendar invites, another angle to discuss, another topic to comment on to bring myself, and the foundation, into the national spotlight.
The only good thing about the clinical hiatus was the copious amount of free time I had on my hands. Plenty of opportunities to hang around with a certain someone who I felt needed a bit more of my attention than I’d been giving.
I kept a wary eye on Sam whenever we were together, still shamed by how thoughtlessly I’d disregarded him when everything with the video had gone down. No matter how much I looked, I couldn’t find any trace of ill feelings from him. Sam was his usual self: quiet, content, cuddly.
Initially, I came up with excuses to see him. The WiFi was better at his house, so could I do my interviews from his home office during the day? On my way back from a downtown broadcast studio, I was starving and happened to pass by his favorite pizza place. Did he want to split one? After a few days, I realized he didn’t need my excuses, so I stopped giving them.
He was always just happy to be with me, no matter what we did or how I ended up at his place. Somehow, this just sank theguilt-knife deeper. Despite our power dynamic on paper, Sam had let me call the shots on us since day one.
When I wasn’t ready to date, we trialed. Before I’d said something, he hadn’t texted me until I initiated. When I told him I needed space, I got it.
It was all a humbling reminder: it wasn’t just me I had to think about anymore. Sam might let me set the pace, but he was an equal partner in this relationship. Thank God he hadn’t been shy about telling me when he had a problem. It was nice to know that he wouldn’t allow me to exploit his kindness, but I had to meet him halfway. As we spent more time together the following week, I made a promise to myself not to take him for granted.
His porch became my home base, and we lingered there as often as we could, chatting with Jas and Conner, or cozying up with some wine after dinner. Tess came over for a girls' night take two, where we consumed almost as much wine as our first girls' outing.
I didn’t remember how I’d filled my days before I had Sam and his family and Tess and Rija around. They rallied around me. Rija cussed up a storm when she recounted just how many surgeries Jones was leading. She assured me that the nursing staff had planned a revolt.
As the week wore on and the hype around the Dancing Doctors dissolved, we grew more confident that the viral video storm was blowing over. The PR teams were grasping at straws for interviews now, and those Zoom meetings were getting fewer and fewer. Sam even drove me to the gym the next Thursday night for a class, going out of his way to park in theexact spotmy car had been parked that first night he’d put his mouth on me. Cheeky.
I was so busy teasing him about it I didn’t pay enough attention when I walked into the gym and almost smacked right into Katie McDaniels. Only Sam’s arm around my middlestopped me from falling. He pulled me against him to steady me, letting go the second he registered who stood in front of us.
“Oh.” Katie stared. We stared back, Sam’s body radiating heat behind me. “I should have asked the name of your brother’s gym, so this didn’t happen.” She lowered her voice. “I swear, I just looked up gyms around here, and this one had good reviews. One of them said sometimes there’s kickboxing here. And that the owner will modify workouts for….” She trailed off, her fingers grazing her belly.
“Um. Mrs. McDaniels?” Will held out a credit card and a receipt, quirking his brow at us.
