Chapter Eight

We were both breathless when the kiss ended. If I hadn’t been in his tight embrace, I might have dropped to my wobbly knees like a caravan camel. I slipped out of my sandals, hoping closer contact with hard ground would stabilize my legs.

He slipped out of his boots as well.

After another breathless repeat of the lip lock that turned my legs to rubber, I suggested we cool off with a wade in the pond. Taking my arm, he helped me navigate the rocks down the bank until we were ankle deep in cold water, being refreshed by a gentle mist from the falls. The sound of rushing water made talking impossible, but holding hands again, I could feel some kind of communication surge between us. Electricity. Could the falls generate such a thing—like heat from a campfire if you inched too close to the flame?

The last time I remembered being at the base of the falls was over ten years ago. I was saving Evan from the sheet of water that swept away the collectible stones he was washing. Gran screamed from the bank amid several spectators as Evan slipped under the falls, briefly. A cop with big hands rescued us, and Evan was handed up through a line of good Samaritans, whining like any wet eight-year-old kid about his lost rocks. We got off that time with a big lecture after I took the blame for being much older—and supposedly wiser.

In the hands of another cop, I had the same mixed feelings about being in any danger, and feeling once again that I had to take the blame for Evan. Would Dallas understand if I opened the trunk and confessed all? If he turned a blind eye to the theft of a young man with Asperger’s, would his new job be in jeopardy?

My sudden attraction to Hot Stuff was threatening my comfort zone—and every other zone in my body. All my life, I had happily sacrificed for my diminishing family, guarding my heart against anything that could separate us. Said heart was feeling as brittle as a stale candy heart.

We hung around the park for another hour or so, walking barefoot in the cool grass, and then sitting atop a dry picnic table, talking about his family back home, the crime and politics in Dallas, and why he wanted to settle down in a cooler climate—and a safer place to someday raise a family. He knew what he wanted, a decisive man of integrity. And when I felt him take my hand to play with my fingers, I was torn between showing him what was in my trunk or visualizing a future with him. I couldn’t imagine one would lead to the other. He was just too good to be true, and if I learned he liked me as much as I liked him, I could blow it all by confessing my guilt.

Our clothes were dry by the time he drove me back home. Before we parted, he pointed out all the bells and whistles on his new Harley. “I always wanted one of these, never thought I’d find one in a boring little village like this.”

“Boring, huh?”

He pulled me close enough to show the moonlight gleam in his eyes. “Well, not everything here is boring.” He kissed me goodnight, pulling on my bottom lip and trailing kisses to a tender spot behind my ear.

I wished we were still in my beetle with the console jabbing into my back.

The putta-putta-putta of the cycle competed with the rev of my heart. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he promised, with a final, lazy grin before he veered off into the night.