Kissing Annie had been a mistake.
Matt had acknowledged as much as he’d walked—not entirely steadily—away from her front door and toward his parked car after she’d let herself into her condominium.
Yet seven weeks after committing the error, he was still grappling with the emotional implications of it.
He was also trying to figure out why, when it came to dates, the “real thing” seemed infinitely less satisfying than the practice one.
“So?” Eden Powell inquired, her dulcet voice discreetly lowered. “What do you think of her?”
Matt slanted a quick glance at his sister-in-law then returned his attention to the lavish display of food in front of him. “Too much is not enough” had always been his parents’ philosophy when it came to arranging refreshments for the open house they’d held on the last Sunday in July for more than three and a half decades. This year, however, the abundance of choices was almost overwhelming.
“Matt?” Eden prodded, plainly determined to get an answer.
Disciplining his expression into neutrality, Matt transferred a piece of fried chicken from a piled-high buffet platter to the plain white china plate he was holding.
What do you think of her?
How many times had he been asked that question—or a variation of it—since he’d started dating? he wondered.
A dozen?
Two dozen?
More. Definitely more. And he was getting pretty sick of it.
Taking the plunge into Atlanta’s “huge pool” of available women was one thing. Being expected to assess every unmarried female who floated into view was entirely another. He was still trying to figure out what his standards of judgment were supposed to be!
Oddly enough, one of the few people who hadn’t put the “What do you think?” inquiry to him was the woman who’d done the most to get him into the singles’ social swim. Annie Martin seemed genuinely indifferent to how—or with whom—he was applying the insights into the “contemporary male-female thing” he’d gotten from her.
This wasn’t to say that he’d made a concerted effort to fill his best buddy in on how he’d been filling up his personal calendar since she’d called a halt to their practice dates. He hadn’t. In point of fact, he’d been grateful for her apparent lack of curiosity. As open as he and Annie had always been with each other, he’d felt a certain sense of constraint in the wake of the kiss they’d shared. Talking with her about the various women with whom he’d been going out seemed inappropriate.
No. It was worse than that. Talking with Annie about other women seemed downright unnatural.
Matt realized that there were a lot of reasons for this. But the primary one was that, try as he might, he’d been unable to revert to the “genderless” thinking pattern that had governed his relationship with Annie since their diaper days.
Yes, there’d been many times during the past seven weeks when he would have sworn that they were on the verge of regaining their oh-so-easy platonic parity. But something—a fleeting exchange of looks, an accidental brushing of hands—always seemed to upset the sexual equilibrium.
For him, at least. Annie’s post-kiss state of mind was something of a mystery to him. While she seemed to have put the embrace behind her, he couldn’t be—
“You don’t like her,” Eden said.
Matt stiffened. He looked at his pretty, chestnut-haired sister-in-law, uncomfortably aware that he’d lost the thread of their conversation.
“I, uh, don’t, uh—” He foundered, hoping Eden hadn’t sensed the direction of his thoughts.
“Cheryl,” she supplied with a trace of exasperation. “I’m talking about Cheryl Ames.”
Shifting his weight, Matt began surveying the throng of people gathered in the tree-shaded backyard of his parents’ rambling home. After a few moments—moments during which he noted that Annie still hadn’t put in an appearance—he spotted the woman to whom Eden was referring. She was an attractive brunette, a few years younger than he. She was also the daughter of one of his mother’s sorority sisters.
No, he corrected himself, frowning slightly. The sorority sister’s daughter was the tennis-playing accountant with whom he’d had an enjoyable dinner three weeks ago. Cheryl Ames was the niece of one of his dad’s old army buddies.
“Oh, yeah,” he murmured. “Right. Cheryl Ames.”
“I told Rick you wouldn’t like her.”
Matt’s gaze slewed back to his sister-in-law’s face. “I never said I didn’t like her,” he protested. “For pete’s sake, Eden. I just met the woman! She seems very—uh...” He paused, searching for a pleasantly noncommittal adjective. “Nice.”
His choice of words garnered a groan.
“You’ve got a problem with ‘nice’?” he countered, hoping he didn’t sound as defensive as he was beginning to feel. Lord, he hated this type of interrogation!
“Next you’ll be telling me you think Cheryl has a good personality,” his sister-in-law predicted disgustedly.
“Well...”
Matt let his voice trail off into silence, realizing that anything he said was bound to be used against him sooner or later. When Eden made no response, he returned his attention to the buffet. Passing over a gaudy-looking gelatin-and-fruit combination, he took a dollop of potato salad. He then helped himself to a generous scoop of coleslaw.
“Maybe I should have gotten your mother to invite the woman who gave you the hickey,” Eden commented reflectively.
“What?” Matt nearly dropped his plate. He gaped at his sister-in-law, unable to believe he’d heard what he thought he’d just heard. A hickey? Where in heaven’s name had Eden gotten the idea that he’d been sporting a hickey? He hadn’t had one of those since...since—
Oh, heck. He’d never had a hickey. He couldn’t remember ever having given one, either.
“Rick said you came into work a couple of Mondays ago with a huge suck mark on your—”
“That was an infected bug bite!” Matt cut in sharply, realizing what she must be talking about. On the first Saturday in July he’d gone rafting on the Chattahoochee River—an activity known locally as “shooting the Hooch”—with a woman he’d met through one of his teaching colleagues at Georgia Tech. Although the outing had begun successfully enough, it had deteriorated into a near disaster.
Eden regarded him skeptically. “Rick said it looked a lot like a hickey,” she declared, her tone suggesting that her husband was an authority on the subject.
“I don’t care what Rick said,” Matt snapped, the skin on the left side of his neck tingling with the memory of an itch so intense that no amount of scratching had been able to relieve it. “I got chewed up by a bunch of blood-sucking bugs while I was shooting the Hooch. I had welts all over my chest and back.” He snorted. “I can imagine what my big brother would have made of them. He probably would’ve jumped to the conclusion that I’d attended an orgy.”
“Alone?”
Matt blinked at this seeming non sequitur. “Huh?”
“Did you shoot the Hooch alone?”
“Oh.” He grimaced. “No.”
Eden’s red-brown eyebrows arched toward her hairline. “That bad, was it?”
“It could have been worse.”
“Your date wasn’t the woodsy type, I take it.”
“She claimed she’d been a Girl Scout.”
“But?”
“I guess she flunked the merit badge test about avoiding climbing plants with shiny leaves clustered in threes when you’re taking a bathroom break in the great outdoors.”
Eden looked blank for a moment. Then her eyes widened in appalled comprehension. “Are you saying your date—” she gestured delicately “—in a patch of poison ivy?”
Matt nodded.
Eden’s lips started to tremble. She bit down on the lower one, obviously trying not to laugh. “That...that’s t-terrible,” she finally managed.
“Yeah,” he agreed. As aggravating as his bug bites had been, they’d only afflicted the upper half of his body. His ladyfriend hadn’t been so fortunate. She’d ended up itching in places she couldn’t reach, much less scratch.
Or so she’d furiously informed him the day after their date when he’d called to inquire about her condition. Feeling genuinely sorry for her plight, he’d sent her a dozen roses and a handwritten letter of apology. He’d also ruled out the possibility of asking her for a second date.
He would have warned her if he’d thought she’d needed cautioning about the dangers lurking in their sylvan surroundings. But it had never occurred to him that his companion wouldn’t recognize poison ivy. The woman had a Ph.D. in physics, for heaven’s sake!
“Well, I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” Eden sympathized.
“Water under the bridge,” Matt replied with a shrug.
His sister-in-law smiled at the word play. “The next time you want to shoot the Hooch, you should ask Annie.”
It was a perfectly reasonable suggestion offered in a perfectly reasonable tone. Yet Matt’s reaction to it was a perfectly unreasonable clenching of every muscle in his body.
Lord knew, he’d thought about asking Annie. He’d thought about it a lot. He’d even gone so far as to pick up a phone and punch in her number. But something—Cowardice? Common sense? An instinct for self-preservation?—had prompted him to drop the receiver back into its cradle before the connection actually went through.
The hell of it was, there’d been a time when he would have extended the invitation without a second thought. But ever since that damned third date kiss—
A mistake, he reminded himself fiercely. Kissing Annie had been a mistake!
If only he could figure out how to correct it.
“Annie’s got her own life,” he said, forcing himself to meet Eden’s eyes.
“A life you’ve always been a big part of,” she acknowledged.
“That’s—” he shrugged “—different.”
“Different?” His sister-in-law’s forehead furrowed. “How?”
This was not a question Matt was prepared to ask himself, much less answer for someone else.
“Just different,” he stated flatly. Then, detaching his gaze from Eden’s, he began to scan the other picnic-goers. His pulse accelerated as he caught a fleeting glimpse of a slender woman with bobbed, sable brown hair. Disappointment slowed it back to normal when he got a clearer look at her.
Damn, he thought. Where is she?
“Have you seen Annie?” he asked after a few moments.
“Uh...why, no.”
There was an odd note in his sister-in-law’s musical voice. Responding to the frisson of uneasiness it sent skittering up his spine, Matt turned back to face her.
“Annie’s not coming,” Eden told him after a brief hesitation.
Matt felt as though he’d been slugged in the solar plexus. “Not coming?”
It wasn’t possible, he told himself. Annie would no more skip his parents’ annual picnic than he’d—
His heart lurched as an awful possibility occurred to him.
Good God. What if she hadn’t shown up because of him?
For all that he’d tried to restore their relationship to an even keel during the past seven weeks, Matt knew he’d failed. Where his conversations with Annie had once been free and unfettered, he now felt compelled to test every word they exchanged for double meanings. He also found himself shying from the casual touches—from the hugs of greeting or farewell, the congratulatory pats, the teasing nudges—that had always been part of their friendship. There’d been more than a few times when he’d hesitated to make eye contact with her—much less the physical kind!
While Annie hadn’t indicated any awareness of the changes in his behavior, he knew she must have noticed them. She’d put up with so much from him since Lisa’s death. Supposing she’d finally gotten sick and tired of coping with the problems he presented? Supposing she’d decided to start avoiding places he might be and events he might attend?
He’d phoned her at her office two—no, three—days ago. Their conversation had been brief. Accustomed as he was to Annie’s devotion to her demanding career, he hadn’t thought anything of her statement that she had a million things to do and couldn’t stop to chitchat. But now that he began to replay the exchange, he couldn’t help wondering...
“Annie called your mom this morning and said she had to fly to Miami to straighten out some kind of emergency with one of her ad agency’s biggest client,” Eden said, placing a hand on his arm. “I just assumed she’d called you, too.”
“No.” Matt shook his head, trying to control the emotions roiling within him. “She never—”
“Time’s up, baby brother,” a familiar male voice interrupted. “You’ve monopolized my wife long enough.”
“Oh, hi, sweetheart,” Eden replied, saving Matt the necessity of responding to his older sibling. She turned her face up for a husbandly kiss. Rick Powell accepted her invitation with alacrity.
“Why, Miz Powell,” he murmured with an exaggerated drawl when he finally lifted his mouth from his wife’s. “You have got to be one of the sweetest tastin’ things on offer at this picnic.”
“One of?” his bride of more than nine years repeated, feigning indignation. “Just one of the sweetest tasting things?”
Rick slipped an arm around her waist. “You’ve got some tough competition from my mother’s peach pie, darlin’.”
Eden pretended to resist her husband’s embrace for a moment, then yielded with a smile and allowed him to draw her close. Matt experienced a spasm of envy as he watched how naturally her lithe body curved to fit with his brother’s taller, much more muscular one.
“Well, I guess I can live with coming in second to your mother’s peach pie,” she conceded, nestling her head against her husband’s chest.
“It’s almost a tie,” Rick declared huskily, nuzzling her ear.
Matt fought down an urge to turn away. Except for an abiding sadness over their failure to conceive a child, his brother and sister-in-law had one of the most solid marriages he’d ever seen. Watching the two of them together—absorbing the lambent aura of their love—was very difficult for him. It reminded him of what he’d had. Of what he’d lost. And it hurt.
But it would have hurt less if Annie had been there, he suddenly realized. He’d counted on seeing her today. The notion of being with her and—
The sound of his brother’s baritone voice jerked him out of his reverie.
“What?” he countered sharply.
Rick studied his face for a moment, then produced a half-conciliatory, half-conspiratorial smile. “I know it’s none of my business, Matt,” he admitted. “Still, I have to ask.”
“Rick,” Eden said warningly.
Here we go again, Matt thought, bracing for the query that seemed to be one of the inevitabilities of his evolving social life.
“What do you think of Cheryl Ames?”
* * *
Responding to Matt’s kiss had been a mistake.
Annie had acknowledged as much as she’d attempted—none too deftly—to fasten the locks on the inside of her front door while listening to his car pull away from the curb in front of her condominium.
Yet eight weeks after committing the error, she was still grappling with the emotional implications of it.
She was also trying to figure out why, when it came to dates, the memory of a “practice” one seemed infinitely more alluring than the possibilities offered by the real thing.
Br-r-ring. Br-r-r—
Annie switched off her vacuum cleaner and snatched up her bedside telephone. “Hello?”
“Annie?” an immediately identifiable contralto voice inquired.
Damn, Annie thought, then chided herself for her reaction. Hoping that this call would be from Matt had been foolish. Matt had no reason to phone her. No reason at all.
Except thirty-one years of friendship.
Thirty-one years that seemed to be foundering on the shoals of a single, ill-considered kiss.
“Oh, hi, Zoe,” she said, sinking down onto the edge of her bed.
There was a brief silence. Then, carefully, “Am I catching you at a bad time?”
“No. Of course not.” Annie’s quick denial was accompanied by a prayer that her former college roommate’s intuition was functioning a tad less acutely than usual. Zoe Alexandra Armitage possessed an uncanny ability to read other people’s feelings—the legacy, Annie had decided, of a peripatetic upbringing by parents who happened to be two of the world’s foremost anthropologists. If anyone was going to detect her current emotional turmoil, it was she. “It’s great to hear from you.”
“Are you sure?” Zoe’s inflection signaled that while she’d gauged Annie’s mood and found it troubling, she was prepared to pretend everything was fine if that’s what her friend wanted.
“Positive,” Annie stated, straightening her spine. She flicked a lock of hair off her cheek. “I’d much rather talk to you than clean.”
“You?” The skepticism was delicate but definite. “Cleaning?”
“It’s spring.”
“It’s nearly August.”
“Picky, picky.” Laughing wryly, Annie relaxed into the familiar pattern of banter. To say that she and her former college roommate had different attitudes about housekeeping was to understate the case. Where Zoe was an everything-in-its-place kind of person, her policy tended to be much more...um, laissez-faire.
Lisa had been a lot like Zoe, she reflected suddenly. Not as relentless a tidier-upper to be sure, but still an enthusiastic devotee of the scrub brush, polishing cloth and dust mop. The home she’d created with Matt had been warm, welcoming and extremely well-tended. The first time Annie had gone there for dinner she’d felt—
“Let me guess.” Humor bubbled through Zoe’s beautifully modulated voice. “You discovered you were being overrun by dust bunnies.”
“Just because I’m not a neat freak like you doesn’t mean I’m a total slob,” Annie countered, shoving her unbidden memories of Lisa Davis Powell aside. Comparing herself to Matt’s late but still beloved wife was pointless. She and Lisa had been very different women, with very different aspirations.
“Do you still have blue-green mold growing in your refrigerator?” Zoe inquired dulcetly.
“Do you still keep the contents of your medicine cabinet arranged in alphabetical order?”
“My place in D.C. doesn’t have a medicine cabinet.”
“But if it did, you would—right?”
“Probably,” Zoe acknowledged. “What can I say? I appreciate order.”
“I knew there had to be a logical explanation for your near engagement to that anal-retentive congressman a couple of years ago.”
“Annie!”
“Anal compulsive, then. I always get those two mixed up.”
There was no immediate response.
“I suppose Talcott was a little rigid,” Zoe finally conceded. “It didn’t bother me at first. He seemed perfect. Everything I was looking for in a man. He was so solid. So stable. So—”
“Totally lacking in pizzazz?”
“I’ve had more than enough pizzazz in my life, thank you, very much.” The riposte was cool and crisp.
Considering the stories about her vagabond childhood Zoe had shared over the years, Annie decided that this anti-pizzazz sentiment was understandable. Still, she couldn’t help wishing that her friend would accept the notion that being “solid and stable” didn’t require a man to be as boring as a block of cement.
“What did Mrs. Ogden think of Talcott?” she asked curiously. Arietta Martel von Helsing Flynn Ogden—survivor of three wealthy and powerful husbands, former mistress of at least as many other highly eligible men, and the current doyenne of Washington society—was Zoe’s employer. Although Zoe’s job title was social secretary, and her responsibilities were similar to those of an executive assistant to a Fortune 500 C.E.O., Annie knew that the childless Arietta Ogden treated her like an honorary granddaughter.
“Mrs. Ogden said Talcott was the only man she’d ever met—aside from Calvin Coolidge—who emanated a beige aura.”
Annie chuckled.
“It was after I turned down his proposal,” Zoe went on. “She was trying to convince me that I’d done the right thing.”
“Did she?”
“Mmm.”
Annie interpreted this as an affirmative. “Aside from giving you personal counseling, what’s the grande dame of the Georgetown cave dwellers been up to lately?”
“A state dinner at the White House on Monday. A reception at the British Embassy on Tuesday. A gala at the Kennedy Center on Thursday,” Zoe recited offhandedly. “And last night, an intimate little soiree for an old and dear friend.”
“A prince?”
“A sheik.”
“No beige aura there, I’ll bet.”
“Well, actually...”
“Yes?” Annie prompted, intrigued by Zoe’s tone.
“Even though he’s eighty-two and overweight, I have to admit that Sheik Ali Kamal projects a certain, uh, pizzazz.”
“Age and avoirdupois have nothing to do with pizzazz.”
And neither does the fact that a man’s been your best buddy for more than three decades.
The thought insinuated itself into Annie’s consciousness with dangerous seductiveness. She pushed it away, appalled, her fingers clenching convulsively against the quilt that covered her bed. Forget it, she told herself. Just forget it!
She didn’t want an isolated incident to shatter the relationship that was one of the cornerstones of her life. Yet she feared that was exactly what was going to happen unless she found a way to stop thinking about the embrace she and Matt had—
The realization that Zoe was speaking again deflected Annie’s troubled line of thought.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I, uh, missed—”
“I said, I met Peachy’s landlord last weekend.”
It took Annie a few moments to process this information. “You mean, Lucien Devereaux? The writer?”
“Uh-huh. He was in Washington doing research for his new novel.”
Annie nodded, recalling a recent visit to her favorite bookstore. Lucien Devereaux’s last thriller—a runaway bestseller—had been on prominent display. The cover of the book had been compelling. Ditto the author’s photograph on the back of the dust jacket.
“How does he rate in the pizzazz sweepstakes?” she asked.
“Does the phrase ‘tall, dark and potentially devastating’ mean anything to you?”
Annie mulled the implications of this description. “Maybe that’s why Eden seemed so shook up when she and Rick came back from visiting New Orleans last year,” she speculated. “I just assumed she was reacting to Peachy’s weird neighbors.”
“You mean, the psychic psychologist?”
“To say nothing of the former pro football player turned female impersonator.”
“I seem to remember Eden mentioning something about a three-hundred-pound pastry chef who claims to be able to channel Elvis Presley, too.”
“And those were just the folks in Peachy’s apartment building,” Annie summed up with a laugh. Then she grew thoughtful once again. “Still, if Lucien Devereaux is as hunky as you say...well, you know how protective Eden can be.”
“I also know Peachy is capable of taking care of herself,” Zoe responded. It was an assessment with which Annie tended to agree. Although the youngest of the Wedding Belles danced to a rather bohemian rhythm, she seldom put a foot wrong. “In any case, I got the distinct impression Mr. Devereaux thinks of himself as her honorary uncle. I seriously doubt he’s put the big move on her.”
Annie flinched at her friend’s choice of words.
Shh, Matt had whispered to her eight weeks ago as he’d cupped her chin and tilted her face up toward his. I’m about to make my big move.
Oh, God.
“Annie?”
She stiffened. “What?”
A sigh came through the line.
“Look,” Zoe said after a moment or two, “I know something’s wrong. I also know you don’t want to talk about it. But it might help if you did.”
Annie gnawed her lower lip. She’d said nothing to anyone about what had passed between her and Matt. By mutual agreement, they’d kept their “practice date” arrangement private. It wasn’t that they’d been trying to hide anything. They’d simply decided that it would be wiser not to advertise—much less attempt to explain—what they were doing.
“Annie?” her friend prompted in a quiet but determined voice.
“Have you ever felt you knew somebody inside out, then had something happen that made you look at them in an entirely different way?” she responded, opting for an oblique approach.
“I’ve changed my mind about people.” The admission was wry. “My short-circuited relationship with Talcott Emerson the Third is certainly proof of that.”
“No.” Annie shook her head. “That isn’t what...I mean, I’m not—” She paused, searching for some circumlocution that would communicate the gist of her present confusion without revealing the specifics of its cause. After several increasingly frustrated seconds, she blurted the unvarnished truth. “I’m having a problem with Matt.”
“Matt?” Zoe’s astonishment was a palpable thing. “Are you talking about Matt Powell?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t believe it—you? Having a problem with Matt? What in heaven’s name has he done?”
Annie shifted, discomforted by Zoe’s assumption that Matt, not she, was the guilty party in the current situation. “He’s, uh, started dating.”
“Oh.” Whatever wrongdoing Zoe had been imagining, it clearly wasn’t this. “So...you, uh, disapprove of the women he’s going out with?”
“I don’t know the women he’s going out with!” Annie heard the sharpness in her tone and tried to dull it. “At least, not anymore. Matt told me about some of them in the beginning. But lately he...he hasn’t...”
She stopped, struggling to maintain her equilibrium in a storm of contradictory emotions. She wasn’t going to pretend that she’d enjoyed listening to Matt describe the new women in his life, because she hadn’t. In truth, it had taken considerable force of will to prevent herself from finding fault—some of it justified, a lot of it petty-minded or just plain irrational—with every female he’d mentioned.
Still, as unsettling as Matt’s confidences had been, Annie had accepted them as part of the closeness they’d always shared. And now that he’d stopped discussing all but the most innocuous of details of his revived social life with her, she couldn’t help feeling rejected.
The fact that he was being far less circumspect with other people added to her sense of exclusion. The day after his parents’ annual picnic, Eden had phoned her to relate a story about Matt shooting the Hooch with an unnamed woman whose outdoor skills had obviously left much to be desired. Her former college roommate had made it clear that she’d gotten the ridiculously jumbled tale—which had included references to insects attacks, poison ivy and hickeys—from Matt himself.
Eden had also remarked that her brother-in-law had seemed upset that she, Annie, hadn’t been able to attend his parents’ party. Well, maybe Matt had been. Then again, maybe he hadn’t. He certainly hadn’t contacted her to express his disappointment at her absence!
In truth, the last contact Annie’s best buddy had had with her had been a quick phone call to her office nine—no, ten days ago.
Not that she’d been keeping track. Heaven’s, no! She had far too many other things to think about. Far too many! She had a life that was totally independent of Matthew Douglas Powell. Why this very evening, she was attending a charity fundraiser with local TV reporter, Trent Barnes.
Trent was an enviable escort, Annie reminded herself firmly. One of Atlanta’s most eligible bachelors, according to some of her female acquaintances. Oh, sure, his constant use of aerosol hairspray probably had contributed to the depletion of the ozone layer. But who wasn’t guilty of an occasional sin against the environment? And while their relationship could hardly be described as sizzling—indeed, after she’d deflected a pro forma pass at the end of their first date, he’d candidly admitted he’d rather have her as a sounding board than a sex partner—she still enjoyed his company.
“Are you saying Matt’s stopped talking to you?” Zoe’s tone suggested that if the answer was in the affirmative, she intended to check the latest weather report to find out whether hell had frozen over.
“Not—” Annie twiddled with a lock of hair “—exactly.”
“Then what—exactly—is the problem? I know how worried you’ve been about Matt since Lisa died. I should think you’d be relieved that he’s finally getting out and about.”
“I am,” Annie maintained. “It’s just that Matt and I...we, uh, dated a few times.”
“What?” Zoe’s voice rose and split.
“It was for practice,” Annie hastened to add. “Matt decided he didn’t know much about being single. I mean, he spent his entire adult life with Lisa. From the first time he saw her, he was totally in love. She was his all. His everything. He never thought about another woman. He never had a chance to get into the, uh, contemporary male-female thing.”
“I...see.”
“It was Matt’s idea.” It seemed vital to Annie that she make this point very clear.
“The dating?”
“The practicing.”
Zoe remained silent for several moments. “This ‘practicing’ you and Matt did,” she finally began, plainly picking her words with great care. “I gather it didn’t...ahem, work out?”
“Of course, it worked out!” Annie was stung by what her friend seemed to be suggesting.
“Then what—”
“He kissed me, Zoe.”
“Matt kissed you? Where? When?”
“Outside my condo. At the end of our third practice date.”
“And you...”
Annie drew a shaky breath, suddenly reliving the hot rush of yearning she’d experienced in Matt’s arms. “I—I kissed him back.”
“Ohmigod.” Zoe might have been exultant. Then again, she might have been appalled.
Annie squirmed, plucking at her quilted bedcover, wishing she could recall the confession she’d just made. “Look, don’t try to make a big deal out of this.”
“It sounds as though you’ve already taken care of that.”
“Zoe!” This was not the assessment she’d wanted.
“Have you told him?”
“Have I told who what?”
“Have you told Matt you’re attracted to him?”
“I never said—” Annie nearly choked.
“You didn’t have to.”
“He’s my best friend!”
“You’d rather be attracted to your worst enemy?”
“I am not—”
“Yes, you are.”
Annie said nothing. She wasn’t certain she could.
“Annie?” Zoe eventually asked.
“Still—” Annie swallowed. “—here.”
“You need to tell him.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
It was a very good question. Annie spent nearly a minute searching for an equally good answer.
“Supposing...supposing I did tell him,” she finally responded. “Supposing I said, ‘Matt, I’m attracted to you.’ What if he didn’t say it back, Zoe? Even worse, what if I said it and he told me he wasn’t? Or what if...if—” She broke off, mentally replaying what she’d just said. “Oh, Lord,” she groaned, recognizing the echoes of adolescent-style angst. “I sound like a fifteen-year-old in the throes of an unrequited crush!”
Silence.
“How can you be sure it’s a crush?” Zoe questioned after several moments. Her voice was gentle. “Or that it’s unrequited?”
Annie’s heart turned a single, seamless somersault. Her breath seemed to clot at the top of her throat. How could she be sure—
Her mind fast forwarded through events of the past eight weeks. There was no disputing that Matt’s manner toward her had changed in the aftermath of their kiss. But she’d interpreted this as a reaction to her own unquestionably altered behavior.
Supposing...
No, Annie thought, her body tightening. Two people who’d shared a platonic relationship for thirty-one years did not suddenly discover that they had a passion for each other! What had happened between her and Matt at the end of their third practice date had been an aberration. They’d gotten carried away with the roles they’d been playing. It could have happened to anyone. It didn’t mean anything!
Then again, maybe it did. But what was a transitory frisson of sexual attraction compared to three decades’ worth of friendship?
And yet...
“I can’t be sure,” she conceded. “But I don’t want to take the risk finding out for certain would require.”
“What do you want, then?”
Annie sighed heavily, massaging the nape of her neck with her free hand. “I want things to be the way they were.”
“And if that’s not possible?”
Annie closed her eyes, knowing that there was no if about it. She couldn’t turn back the clock or undo what had been done. There was no revising yesterday—much less the events of two months ago.
“In that case,” she said quietly, “I’ll settle for Matt being happy and for me being able to get on with my life.”