Page 12 of Feels Like the First Time
“The closest you’ll get to the handlebars is sitting on them.” Hawk grabbed her arm. “And since when do you run from a fight?”
“I’m not running.”Liar.“I’m merely leaving it for another day.”
Hawk studied her long and hard, and Ali resisted the urge to look away. “You’re running. What gives?”
The door opened and she could see Bridget’s perfect nose peek out. Followed by her long legs and blond Barbie locks. Her big green eyes widened when she took in Hawk’s back, and then she gave an uncertain smile.
The same smile she got when she ordered strawberry and Ali ordered sherbet.
“Do you still love her?”
Hawk did a double take, then lowered his voice. “Do I still love Bridget? We were married for five years. What do you think, that she left and, poof, I stopped caring? Love doesn’t work that way.”
In Ali’s world love did. But the way he said it, unashamed and so full of conviction, Ali found herself wanting to believe, too.
“Are you stillinlove with her?”
“Pffft…No.”
“Oh God, you hesitated!”
“I didn’t hesitate.” But he hesitated again. “It’s just that no one has ever asked me that question.”
“Well, they should have.” Ali heard the distinct sound of a Tesla pull into the drive, and the pressure grew heavy enough to constrict her breathing.
Then her sister was calling out, in that same alluring come-hither tone that had been passed on from Marshal mother to the older Marshal daughter, “Hawk? Oh my God. Hawk! I can’t believe you’re here.”
Hawk went to turn his head and say hey to his ex, who he claimed he wasn’t still hooked on, but hesitated in doing so, and Ali reached up and grabbed his face. A hard task when he had more than a foot of height on her.
“Focus on me,” Ali said, looking him in the eye. “Are we friends?”
“Yes.”
No hesitation, good. “Do you trust me?”
“You stole my kegs less than ten hours ago.”
“Right.” A car stopped a few feet behind her. Close enough that she could feel the heat from the grille push through her clothes. “But you trusted me enough to do right by the kegs and not call the cops.”
He smiled. “I didn’t call the cops because I trusted the kegs would be unrecognizable by the time they arrived. No sense in wasting good taxpayers’ money.”
“Ali, what are you doing?” Bridget whined, and stomped down the steps. “Stop accosting Hawk and get out of the driveway. You’re blocking Jamie from parking.”
She was also stopping Hawk from getting his heart run over. “Remember how you looked at me in that dress earlier.”
His gaze tracked her body, leisurely but with purpose, until that grin became a full-on smirk—a bit wicked and full of something she’d never seen directed her way. Sexual curiosity. “Yeah, I remember.”
Talk about potent. The man took flirting to an Olympic level.
“Good. Channel whatever that was,” she whispered, fisting her hands in the front of his shirt and dragging him up against her. Because she wasn’t so sure how “over” Bridget Hawk really was. But she knew, with a certainty, Bridget would use her engagement to test him—to torture him with how over him she was. And more than anything, Ali didn’t want him to fail.
She also didn’t want to examine too closely why it mattered to her, because she wasn’t sure she’d like the conclusion she’d come to. Or why her pulse quickened at the mere thought of what she was about to do.
“And follow my lead.”
Then Ali did the only thing she could think of to fix the situation. She went up on wobbly toes.
