“Have a seat.” He pointed to the stools at the counter. “I’ll be right back.” He disappeared into the hallway that presumably led to his bedroom and the bathroom.
The urge to follow him, to force a confrontation, to jump his bones—something, anything—was so strong that instead of giving in she got busy in the kitchen, poking through cabinets in search of mugs, taking a carton of half-and-half from the fridge and giving it a sniff to make sure it was still good, and locating spoons. Gavin took his coffee with just a touch of cream and a teaspoon of sugar. How she knew that she didn’t even know. She’d been paying close attention to her late brother-in-law’s sexy younger brother for as long as she’d known him, which was starting to measure in decades, rather than mere years.
Pathetic.
In all that time, she’d dated other guys. Even had the misfortune of sleeping with some of them. But she had never once felt anything even close to what happened every time Gavin Guthrie walked into a room. Take now, for instance. He’d changed into a T-shirt and old sweats, washed his face and, judging by the minty fresh scent that came with him, apparently brushed his teeth, too. Drops of water clung to the ends of his longish dark hair, and the scruff that covered his well-defined jaw made her want to rub against him in the most shameless way possible.
Then the coffeemaker beeped, and her brain took over once again, shoving her rapidly beating heart aside to remind her that she was having a cup of coffee that would keep her up all night and then getting the hell out of there.
* * *
Gavin had no idea what he’d been thinking when he all but begged Ella to come inside with him. Hell, he barely recalled putting her name in his phone in case of an emergency at a time when his entire life seemed to be one endless emergency after another.
He still had no business dragging Ella into his crap, but at the same time he couldn’t bear to let her drive away not knowing when or if he might see her again. She was like a breath of the freshest, coolest mountain air, infusing him with a warm ray of sunshine in the bleak landscape inside his mind.
Things were bad and getting worse. Pushing her away, repeatedly, hadn’t made anything better. In fact, during a wide-awake moment the night before, Gavin had undergone an epiphany, during which he realized that pushing Ella away was part of what had made everything worse. Thus his invitation for coffee, which had been reluctantly accepted. Not that he could blame her. Ella was a lot of things, but a fool had never been one of them. And she’d be a total, unmitigated fool to shackle herself to him.
He poured the coffee into the mugs she’d placed on the counter, stirring cream and half a packet of sweetener into hers. How did he know how she took her coffee? He didn’t recall not knowing that. He barely recalled a time before he knew Ella and the entire Abbott family. He and his brother Caleb had been friends with Ella’s brothers Hunter and Will since they’d moved to Butler when the Guthries were in fifth and sixth grades. Caleb had started dating Hannah when they were all in high school, and the two families had been close ever since, never more so than in the difficult years that followed Caleb’s death.
Gavin pushed his thoughts away from that sorrowful topic. He was getting sick and tired of the relentless grief that refused to give him an ounce of slack lately, especially since Caleb’s dog died and Hannah got remarried. Life went on, even when you thought it couldn’t possibly. Maybe it was time to allow his life to move forward, too.
He couldn’t seem to picture that life without Ella as part of it in some way, but he had amends to make where she was concerned, and there was no time quite like the present.
Gavin put the mug on the counter in front of her and brought his with him to sit on the stool next to hers. “Listen, El . . . I wanted to tell you—”
She held up her hand to stop him. “Please, don’t. I just can’t rehash it all again.”
“How do you know what I was going to say?”
“Because,” she said with resignation that tugged at his heart, “you’ve said it all before, and there’s only so much rejection a girl can take before she begins to get a complex.”
“Eleanor, look at me.” His use of her full name clearly startled her as she looked up at him with those wide, liquid brown eyes that could hide nothing, her lips parting with surprise. Yeah, he’d thought about that kiss on the beach in Burlington a few thousand times since, and hearing she’d been out with another guy made him feel panicky in addition to all the other unpleasant emotions he’d been contending with lately. “I never meant to reject you. It had nothing at all to do with you. I need you to know that.”
“So you say.”
“I mean it. Every time we’ve . . . talked . . . in the last few months, I’ve walked away from you because I had to, not because I wanted to.” She was very focused now on her mug of coffee rather than him, not that he could blame her.
“What happened tonight?”
“Tonight,” he said with a sigh, “I discovered my reputation is beginning to precede me. I had a couple of beers with some guys from work, and decided to hit Red’s on the way home for a nightcap. I was minding my own business at the bar when Red came in, saw me there and turned it into a federal case because of what happened down the road. I tried to tell him I don’t want any trouble, but he wasn’t hearing it. Somehow that big dude got ahold of my phone, and . . . And, well, you know the rest.”
“What was your plan for getting home?”
“I’m not an idiot, Ella, despite how it might seem lately. I was going to call a cab.”
She jumped up, those same soft eyes now flashing with anger. “If the bouncer hadn’t stopped you, you would’ve driven home. For God’s sake, Gavin, don’t make everything worse by lying to my face.”
“I never would’ve driven home. I would’ve walked before I drove—I’ve done it before.” When she eyed him skeptically, he ran his hands through his hair. “I know how it looked, but that guy was pissing me off getting up in my grill the way he was.”
“Someone needs to get up in your grill to make this crazy shit stop!”
In all the years he’d known her, he’d never once heard sweet, lovely Ella Abbott yell at anyone—or swear—and since she was one of ten siblings, that was saying something. Her raised voice did the same thing to him a slap to the face would have. It woke him up once and for all. He closed the small distance between them, hooked an arm around her waist and tugged her in close to him.
If she’d been surprised before, she was flat-out stunned now.
“The only person I want up in my grill, Ella, is you.” And then he kissed her the way he’d been dying to since that day at the beach, since the day he’d gotten his first taste of her and developed a hunger for her that had kept him awake on many a night after he pushed her out of his life.
Just as she could only take so much rejection, he could only take so much temptation. Eventually, someone was going to snap.
Her hands, which had been lying flat against his chest, were now pushing hard—hard enough for the signal to reach his kiss-addled brain. She tore her lips free, and that was when he realized only one of them had been enjoying that kiss. “Stop it.” She rubbed her forearm over her lips, seeming to wipe him off, which actually hurt him more than it should have. As if he had any right. “What’re you doing?”
“I thought that was rather obvious.” Since her mouth was apparently unavailable, he directed his attention to the long, elegant neck that had occupied far too many of his Ella-related fantasies.
But she was having none of that either. “Knock it off, Gavin. Whatever game you’re playing, I’m not interested.” The tears that gathered in her eyes said otherwise, but she turned away from him and headed for the door.