Page 86 of The Matchmaker
“Nah. Too old. Plus all my friends are here,” I say. “Do you know how hard it is to make new friends as an adult? Extremely hard. I don’t want to move to a new place and be all by myself.”
“You wouldn’t be by yourself.”
“At the start, I would.”
“Not if I went with you.”
I keep my expression neutral, even as my heart skitters in my chest. “You’d go with me?”
“Why not?” he asks, as if that’s not a big deal.
“Where?”
“Anywhere.”
“To Timbuktu?”
He smiles faintly. “If you asked nicely.”
“I always ask nicely. I’m very nice.”
“And that’s why you won’t have any problem making friends. Even as a wizened, geriatric twenty-eight-year-old.”
“I’m twenty-nine.”
“Ah, well, then you might have a problem.”
“Granny’s lived in this village her whole life,” I muse. “But I guess she never had the chance to leave. She met my grandad when she was only a teenager, and they had my dad pretty young. And then she had to look after me and…” I trail off, realizing I’m heading into new territory, but when I don’t change subject, Callum picks it up.
“That first day here,” he says. “When you found out about Jack’s plans, you said your parents were gone, but I didn’t know if that was just…”
“The heat of the moment?” I ask, and he shrugs. “It wasn’t. They were in a car accident when I was kid.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“And the car accident,” he continues carefully. “That’s why you got nervous in the car that time?”
I nod, and he drops his head back.
“And now I feel like an asshole.”
“You didn’t know,” I remind him. “And I’m not usually that bad. It’s better if I’m talking or distracted, but if I let myself think about it too much, I get…”
“Anxious.”
“Yeah.” I give him a weak smile. “Still want to go to Timbuktu with me?”
“I don’t mind walking.”
I look up at him, my heart doing that rapid thumpity-thump that it seems to do more and more when he’s around.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” I tell him, and then do just that.
A low, gravelly noise rumbles through him, and he starts moving, backing us toward the picnic bench, where he picks me up as if I weigh nothing at all and sits me on the table.
He doesn’t stop kissing me, and I inch forward, pressing myself against him and running my hands over the waistband of his jeans, just above where I can feel his growing desire for me. He allows it for a few minutes until my fingers slip underneath his T-shirt and follow the trail of fine hair I find below his navel, going down down down to—
